She doesn’t rush. Each reference lands with calibrated pauses, as if she’s giving him time to hear his own words turned back on him.
“‘Interlocutors, not commodities,’” she repeats, letting the old dissertation phrase hover in AR text beside her shoulder. “You wrote that before you’d even seen real off‑world anomalies. Before this station started to…change.”
The word change syncs with a new set of overlays blossoming around her: a translucent map of Prithvi‑Parikrama, faint threads of bioluminescent color linking Raghukul, Sharanam, and the shafts under Vaishnavi in a slow, organic pulse. The station looks less like infrastructure and more like a nervous system coming online.
“You understood the stakes before the rest of us,” she continues. “And you understood the people involved. Your memo after the exercise in Sharanam. It circulated. Quietly.”
His throat feels dry. He tries not to look at the memo; he remembers how quickly the feedback channel closed after he sent it.
“We adjusted protocol because of you,” she lies or half‑lies smoothly. “Flagged refugee decks for ‘collaborative drills’ only. Small changes, but you nudged the arc. You already have influence. You just don’t see the scale yet.”
His own biometric trace appears next: schematic of his left arm, golden inlays annotated with part numbers and firmware revisions; a neural activity graph overlaid with a meditation app logo; a heatmap of his movement across decks over the last six months, bright trails between Vaishnavi, Sharanam’s intake checkpoints, and even the distant Sargam hub.
“Look at this,” she says. “Your body is already integrated hardware. Your practices already integrate tradition and system data. And your routes? You move where no one else with your clearance routinely moves. Corporate, colonist, refugee, independent. You’ve made yourself a bridge.”
She lets the word hang.
“You worry we’ll use you to strip‑mine a new ecology,” she says softly. “We worry that without you, someone far less…conscientious will define it first. You meditate on interdependence, Dr. Rao. Interbeing. This is that, at station scale.”
Her silhouette leans in, the anonymity filter glitching just enough to suggest a human outline behind the mask.
“We called you because your hesitation is an asset. It’s already in the model. We need someone whose first impulse is to listen: to the data, to the people, to the organisms themselves. To negotiate terms of coexistence before anyone else even admits there’s a party at the table.”
The map of the station pulses once, all three anomaly clusters brightening in slow unison.
“Help us set those terms,” she finishes. “Or accept that someone else will.”
She doesn’t just quote; she unspools a case file disguised as praise.
“Your phrase, ‘interlocutors, not commodities’, wasn’t a rhetorical flourish,” she says. The words appear between them, annotated with citation tags, cross‑linked to simulation runs he’d half‑forgotten he’d ever submitted. “We built training modules off that. Scenario trees. Decision prompts.”
A swipe, and his Sharanam memo surfaces beside it, redacted headers ghosting around his blunt questions about unilateral quarantine drills.
“You asked whether we were rehearsing protection or domination,” she recalls. “That line in particular triggered a policy review.” No documentation to prove it, but she does not let the possibility of impact go unspoken. “You think you were ignored. The record says otherwise.”
Then his body becomes exhibit C. The prosthetic arm, rotated in holo, golden inlays tagged with firmware hashes and sensory bandwidth; his meditation app logs plotted against cortisol spikes and lab output; a ghostly trace of his footfalls threading Vaishnavi, Sharanam gates, Sargam’s free‑float hub.
“You call this surveillance,” she says mildly. “I call it evidence. You inhabit devotion and data simultaneously. You traverse class partitions no one else in your band of clearance even attempts.”
The station map’s bioluminescent threads tighten around his highlighted routes.
“We didn’t overlook your doubts,” she finishes. “We selected for them.”
Her hand cuts through the air, erasing his objections as if they’re smudges on a screen, and re‑rendering them as features. His refusal to rubber‑stamp past overreaches becomes, in her framing, proof that he is “the safest pair of hands” for something this volatile; his stalled emails, his flagged cautions, all recast as reassuring guardrails rather than resistance. The emergent network isn’t dangerous or sacred in her language: it’s an “ethical vacuum,” a power‑shaped silence that will inevitably be occupied. If not by him, then by a profiteer captain moving cold cargo through Raghukul, or by a frightened security bloc primed to sterilize first and brief later. The dilemma she sketches is brutally simple: either he authors the story, or he accepts whatever story others write in blood and bleach.
As she speaks, the blurred status boards behind her betray more than scale: fragmentary project codenames in looping Devanagari (NARAYANA‑GRID, PRALAYA‑FENCE, SATTVA‑FILTER) cycling too fast to parse, a “Contingency: Hull‑Purge” protocol half‑obscured by static, a notification pulsing toward a security cluster that could easily include Vaidisha’s unit. Higher‑tier authorization sigils blink at the periphery, cool and impersonal. The realization settles in his gut: she is only an emissary of a much colder calculus, one that has already costed out acceptable fatalities, pressure‑loss corridors, and which decks get vented first if containment fails. Or if someone else, some colonist captain or frightened refugee, dares to seize first contact before the corporation does.
The hook arrives dressed as consecration: a discrete, off‑ledger charter, his name already glowing in the lead investigator field, conditional IP tranches unfolding like a yantra of clauses, and a promised advisory seat on “xenoecological governance” panels that officially do not yet exist. Audit trails will be “minimized,” field calls “trusted,” provided his insight remains proprietary and his samples obediently flow inward. When the holo finally gutters and the alcove’s walls revert to dull alloy, he understands she has not offered employment but ordination. Anointing him as the vector through which corporate consciousness will name, delimit, and quietly enclose whatever this nascent, networked life is struggling to become.
Framing the mission as cartography, not theft
With a small pinch‑zoom of her fingers, the abstract clauses evaporate and the station blooms in midair: Prithvi‑Parikrama rendered as a luminous, rotating torus threaded with fainter, filamentous overlays. Bio‑signatures swell and recede along its circumference like slow, tidal breaths. Raghukul’s docking arms glow first, spangled with points of living fluorescence in the hairline fractures of the hull; Sharanam’s inner rings flicker with soft, riverlike bands; beneath Vaishnavi, a thin haze of motes pulses in sync with pressure-cycle telemetry.
“We’re asking you to map a new ocean,” she says, voice smoothing into something almost pedagogical, “before pirates chart their own lanes.” A fingertip traces an invisible coastline along the hull, linking the colonist docks to the shadowed refugee annex, then arcing up toward the dignified sweep of the research ring. “Right now these are uncharted currents, Dr Rao. No buoys, no shipping lanes, no storm warnings. Whoever draws the first reliable charts sets the beacons for everyone else.”
Layers blossom at her command: thermal gradients overlaid with biochemical spectra, microfracture diagrams intersecting with water‑quality anomalies and air‑shaft flow models. “What we need is coherence,” she continues. “A layered portrait of the system. Are the hull growths at Raghukul seeding Sharanam’s reclaimers? Are the traces beneath Vaishnavi downstream… or upstream? Do they share signaling motifs, metabolic complements, stress responses?” Each question hangs in the air as a ghostly annotation, then collapses into a tidy icon.
“Think of it as xenoecological cartography,” she repeats, as if the phrase might sanctify the work. “You’re not strip‑mining, you’re surveying. Establishing baselines, connectivity, resilience. Giving this… phenomenon… its first true map, so responses can be proportionate, not panicked.”
Behind her rhetoric, sub‑windows flick to life, half‑transparent: each pulsing zone quietly bracketed by provisional patent identifiers, jurisdictional overlays, and export‑control flags. Legal code scrolls like bathymetric lines, delineating not depths but ownership. The map she’s offering him is also a deed, he realizes, its legends already prewritten in the fine print of “discovery.”
Breaking down the required harvest
Now that the sea‑metaphor is seeded, she turns to inventory. The map, she says, must be stocked with “representative biotic assets.”
Her gesture tightens the holo to three pulsing strata. “First: structural matrices from the Raghukul hull zone. We need progressive scrapes along microfracture vectors: outermost frost, mid‑depth filaments, any nodular accretions at crack termini. Documented orientation, stress history, thermal cycling.” Icons of microneedle arrays and vacuum‑rated samplers bloom beside the dock’s schematic.
“Second: Sharanam.” The refugee ring glows a muted blue. “Filter cores, yes, but in sequence, intake, mid‑loop, return. Preserve vertical and radial gradients. Inline flow cytometry if you can swing it. We want community structure, not just taxa lists.”
“Third: Vaishnavi’s undercarriage. Condensate films from shaft ceilings, dust aggregates from cable runs, any spore‑like particulates caught on turbulence baffles. Sterile traps only; no open sweeps. Airflow modeling must couple to your collection log.”
As she speaks, his prosthetic fingers curl and extend, ghosting through familiar motions: seal the vial, mark the vector, log the reading. Routine gestures, repurposed. Under her vocabulary of “assets” and “matrices,” he still hears what it really is: a forced biopsy of the station’s new, half‑visible skin.
The holo deepens from cartography into anatomy. Branches of color-coded pathways unfurl like nervous systems, each node tagged with expectation. The “deliverable,” she repeats, is a living cross‑section, not trophies in nitrogen. Raw sequence feeds upward into draft operons, predicted riboswitches, regulatory motifs; flux models chew through nutrient gradients and gamma spikes, spitting out adaptive curves. She wants perturbation suites, too: how the network flares or dims when you starve one node at Raghukul, warm a conduit under Vaishnavi, flush a filter at Sharanam. Cross‑correlation panes shimmer with hypothetical entrainment signatures, coherence scores ticking in the corner. “We need its decision surface,” she says, almost gently. “Its tolerances. Its reflex arcs. Anywhere a nudge becomes a shove.”
Translating insight into control
With a minimal gesture, she conjures another tier of overlays: draft quarantine lattices, ownership clauses, preformatted regulatory briefs. Once Kavitesh delivers his schema, she explains, legal and policy can freeze fluid reality around it. File foundational patents on metabolic pathways and adaptive traits, codify “safe” versus “hazardous” strains, propose station-wide protocols keyed to his classifications and risk indices. His models will underwrite where security may pre-emptively cordon off refugee corridors, how aggressively colonist docks are monitored, which independent labs lose access, which corporate vaults are anointed “trusted” to hold viable cultures. “You’ll be setting the standard,” she says evenly: leaving unsaid that once inscribed in corporate code, the ecosystem’s meaning, and fate, will be almost impossible to dislodge or appeal.
The station holo becomes a lattice of pulsing veins and nodal glows, Prithvi‑Parikrama reimagined as a body still knitting itself together. The weight in his chest is not awe but foreclosure. This isn’t a race for comprehension; it’s a land grab in slow motion. Whoever fixes the first ontology, names, pathways, thresholds, will quietly legislate what counts as “self” and what can be trimmed away as waste. To accept is to help corporate pour wet, living process into legal molds: hazard classes, asset tags, containment tiers. Colonists and refugees will inherit those definitions as fate. So will the organism, if it survives. “Lead investigator” begins to sound like registrar of deeds for a world that has not yet finished deciding where its borders lie.
She shifts the projection’s center of mass back toward Vaishnavi with a practiced pinch‑zoom, peeling away cosmetic hull layers until the research ring appears as a hollowed bone, riddled with fine canals. Bio‑signatures shimmer along maintenance shafts beneath the cleanrooms, a ghostly corona under the neat labels of Vedic deities. “And here,” she says, tapping a pulse just below his own lab sector. A ribbon of faint luminescence threads past coolant manifolds, skirts an access hatch tagged for engineering use only, and kisses the edge of a sensor relay that feeds into corporate traffic control.
“This is your house, Doctor Rao. Our house.” Her voice stays mild, but the emphasis is precise. The organism is not just haunting colonist seams and refugee plumbing; it is brushing the foundations of their highest‑security science. The anomaly’s signal blurs against instrument noise, as though it has learned to hide in the analytic grain of the very tools he trusts.
She sketches a second scenario, more dangerous than smugglers stuffing sealed canisters. “Suppose it is not merely transported,” she says, “but begins to co‑author our infrastructure. It learns our thermal cycles, our packet timings, our maintenance routines. It attenuates a sensor here, amplifies a micro‑leak there. Nothing dramatic, nothing that trips an alarm. Until some captain with a side deal finds his hull readings mysteriously forgiving, his quarantine scans a little less fussy.”
Her fingers flick through incident logs: near‑miss collisions, anomalous sensor shadows around outer‑ring freighters, unsourced glitches in docking telemetry. All still within statistical tolerances, all suddenly reinterpretable as early negotiations between life and machine. “If it settles into our systems before we have a grammar for it,” she continues, “then every deck, every conduit, becomes a potential co‑conspirator. At that point, Command will not talk in terms of stewardship, or ethics, or IP. They will talk in terms of purging code and burning out hardware.”
She lets the rotating model pause with Vaishnavi half‑lit, half shadowed by the anomaly’s glow. “You see why we are coming to you now, and not after Security, or Traffic, or external regulators decide this for us.”
Now the station map ripples outward again and resolves around Sharanam’s shadowed ring. She peels back bulkheads until the refugee Annex appears as nested circles of jury‑rigged infrastructure. Overlays flare to life: water reclaimer schematics threaded with pale motes where the telemetry has picked up anomalous metabolisms. The signatures cluster exactly where people stand barefoot in queues, where steam halos communal taps, where women scrub pots and whisper mantras into rising vapour.
She does not narrate any of that. “High‑contact zones,” she says instead, tagging them with clinical icons. “Multiple, unscheduled interfaces between unregistered individuals and contaminated hardware. Historically, that is where smugglers recruit carriers, Doctor Rao.” A new layer ghosts in: contraband routes extrapolated from past seizures, arcing from Sharanam toward the Raghukul docks and out into unlogged cargo space.
“One unmonitored junction,” she continues, tapping a single service hatch that ties a reclaimer sump to a maintenance corridor, “and you have a live‑culture export pipeline we cannot plausibly deny we foresaw.” The model zooms back, enclosing the entire Annex in a faint quarantine lattice. “If we cannot demonstrate prior, responsible engagement? The simplest narrative for regulators will be: ‘the refugee ring is the biohazard.’”
She lets that phrase hang, then adds, almost gently, “You, however, can give us a different story to tell.”
Instead of the quick pan-and-zoom of a briefing, she slows the image until it feels like intrusion. The Vaishnavi Ring’s elegant torus dissolves into cross‑section: service chases, cable looms, the blind backs of bulkheads no one bothers to bless with icons. There, in the interstices, filaments of anomalous signal thread along access shafts he has walked a hundred times without really seeing. She highlights one conduit that passes under his sector’s mantra‑etched alcove, another that skirts the containment vault. “These are not spillovers from someone else’s negligence,” she says. “They are mapping us.”
Her cursor traces potential vectors: into data cores, into coolant trunks, into the sensor lattice that feeds Traffic Control. “Once they cross certain envelopes, the station will answer in its own language. You know that language. It has only two verbs: contain and erase.”
A new layer appears: a hard red band representing threshold parameters, mass density, metabolic flux, signal coherence, etched across the graphs like a lakshman‑rekha. She explains that once the aggregates breach that band in any major node, central failsafes will reinterpret them as a coordinated invasive system and trigger broad‑spectrum sterilization: chemical purges in ducts, brutal thermal cycling in reclaimers, possibly even directed radiation along exposed hull trusses and antenna spines. It will not matter, she says, whether the network is intelligent, symbiotic, or simply exquisite pattern; the algorithms will erase first and ask questions never, scrubbing out the very data, possibilities, and ethical choices he cares about: and writing refugees, colonists, and his own lab in the same expendable script.
With a gesture she narrows the data cascade into a single, throbbing corridor of time, mere hours at the tight end, a couple of days if everything misbehaves politely, between now and the failsafe thresholds. In that closing interval, she reminds him, move all the uncontrolled variables: smugglers noticing sensor blind spots at the Raghukul arms, security officers like Vaidisha quietly flagging anomalous swabs near Sharanam and being told to “monitor only,” exhausted maintenance techs scraping away “weird fuzz” from vents with improvised tools and no biocontainment, Dev‑types jury‑rigging bypasses around clogged filters on night shift. What corporate is putting on the table, she says, is a mandate to move faster and more coherently than any of them, with just enough classified latitude to design a sampling and containment architecture that takes living cross‑sections of the emerging web without shredding its topology, stabilizes key nodes in situ where possible, and buys down the risk of both a panicked smuggler’s fire‑sale and an automated, station‑wide purgation that would erase the phenomenon, and everyone later blamed for it, before the story can even declare its first terms.
She doesn’t sugarcoat the leverage behind the offer; if anything, she lingers on each clause so he feels exactly how it bites.
A secure, long‑horizon grant line, she says, carved out inside the labyrinth of budgets under the innocuous codename Project Vaishnavi‑Δ. Ten cycles minimum, renewable on scientific merit rather than quarterly profit, insulated from the whims of some executive’s portfolio reshuffle. His name is not a pencilled‑in courtesy at the end; it is hard‑coded, she repeats, as principal investigator on the master protocol. Every primary finding, every flagship paper routed through internal review, will carry his name first.
On the display, his identifier blooms along the proposed org chart: a thin filament of text suddenly anchoring whole branches of responsibility. Data modeling, field sampling, biocontainment design: arrows fan outward, all terminating in “Rao, K. (PI).” For someone who has spent years buried in appendices and acknowledgments, a technician‑scholar whose contributions live in “see Supplementary Methods,” it hits him like a sudden decompression. Not vacuum, but the inverse: like someone has cracked a sealed hatch in his chest and flooded him with oxygen he did not know he’d been rationing.
Air. Space. Authorship.
He can feel the shape of it before he lets himself think the word: agency. No more waiting for senior investigators to decide which anomalies are “strategic” enough to pursue, no more watching Dev‑type staff get quietly written out of narratives because they don’t have the right badge color. With a PI credential, he could shield them (on paper at least) fold their work into a legitimate framework instead of scavenged notes and black‑market access. He could define which questions matter: not just “Can it be weaponized?” or “Can it be sold?” but “What does it want?” “What does it do to us if we listen?”
The grant is a vector, an orbit change: if he accepts the delta‑v. It promises a future in which he is no longer a replaceable component in the Vaishnavi Ring’s machinery, but one of the engineers of its ethical trajectory. And the realization leaves him light‑headed, because the same mechanism that offers him breath could just as easily fix the atmosphere for everyone else.
The contract language is brutal in its precision: clause numbers marching like infantry, each sub‑point a little kill‑shot of inevitability. A bespoke rider carves out partial IP rights for him on any diagnostic suites, containment architectures, or biotechnologies spun out of the project, “including but not limited to derivative platforms, adaptive algorithms, and secondary commercial applications.” His name is there in cold text, tethered to a percentage, audit‑proof and inheritable. It is, almost word for word, the loophole he’s fantasized about in late‑cycle meditation: a clean burn to a different orbit, a financial and professional exit vector from standard corporate indenture. Ten years of steady funding, plus a tail of royalties, is enough to buy down his family’s debts planetside, to walk away from shift‑locked contracts and choose what work he will do.
Yet in the same paragraphs, he can see how tightly the corporation intends to bind him. Profit‑share triggers are tied to “successful deployment” and “market penetration” of tools that treat the emergent web as asset and resource. His prosperity is directly coupled to the commodification of whatever this ecology becomes, his freedom indexed to how efficiently it can be sliced, branded, and sold.
They dangle not just status but moral leverage: an assurance that he will have primary input on quarantine schemas, with explicit permission to design “minimally destructive containment regimes” and to flag any proposed sterilization protocols for additional review. On the surface, it is an invitation to encode his own ethics into the scaffolding of station policy. An opportunity to build guardrails that might prevent the reflexive incineration of anything inexplicable. His cursor hovers over phrases like “preservation of functional ecological integrity where operationally feasible,” legalese he himself could refine into something closer to ahimsa, non‑harm as default rather than exception. If he accepts, every hatch that slams, every vent that floods with disinfectant foam, might at least do so through procedures he has argued into being.
To sweeten the illusion of conscience, they promise him a rotating seat on an internal ethics panel convened specifically for xenobiological events, a body that will draft guidance and precedent for all future discoveries. The panel, however, is strictly in‑house: corporate legal, select research leads, one security liaison: no colonist elders, no refugee advocates, no independent teachers like Savitriya to ask the inconvenient questions. He can advise, he can dissent, he can write exquisitely careful cautions into sealed minutes and append footnoted reservations. But the circle of those allowed to know and decide remains tightly closed, a hermetic karmic loop in which cause and consequence never leave the boardroom.
The nondisclosure clauses land like a quiet blow: absolute embargo on external publication without multilayer review, and a categorical ban on sharing raw data or even the project’s existence with colonist councils, refugee committees, or independent hubs. To accept is to become a gatekeeper of knowledge that directly shapes the air they breathe and the water they drink, to trade open solidarity for backstage influence and whispered interventions. As he reads, he feels the fork crystallize: step inside, try to bend the system toward protection from within, and risk becoming the architect of quarantines that might one day fence in the very lives he meant to defend, their fate encoded in protocols bearing his signature.
Tactical assessment reframed as vow
He leans his forehead against the cool bulkhead beside the shrine’s flickering holo‑diya, letting the thrum of circulation pumps fill the silence where prayers should be. The list of reasons to decline, politics, danger, moral contamination, unspools again, but something in him has shifted. The same calculations that felt like alibis all day reorder themselves into a campaign map.
Raghukul first. Raghuveeran’s maze of docking arms and cargo holds, threaded through with unlicensed cargo and hushed deals. Corporate insignia there is like a target painted on your own chest. Any misstep and he’s not just a scientist; he’s an informant whose work could shut ships down and starve outer colonies. Yet the hull growths along those struts are some of the earliest anomaly readings he logged. If the network has a memory, part of it may live there. Walking away means leaving that memory to smugglers who see “specimen” where he sees “relation.”
Sharanam next: the Annex where refugees patch their own leaks with scavenged filters and faith. They already live with the knowledge that air and policy can both be cut off without warning. If word spreads that a corporate xenobiologist is quietly sampling their water lines, it will taste like poison. A fresh confirmation that they are test subjects, not citizens. But the signatures in their reclaimers are gentler, more integrated than anything in the docks: a sign, perhaps, that the new life is learning to coexist with human waste and warmth. Ignoring it would be its own kind of betrayal.
And beneath Vaishnavi, the shafts he knows only as abstract vectors on maintenance schematics: conduits pulsing with data and coolant, every hatch watched, every badge swipe immortalized in a log. To move there is to walk directly under the gaze of the people who just handed him this sleek digital contract, its clauses sharp as scalpels. One flagged access anomaly, one misplaced sample, and he could find himself locked out of his own lab. Or locked in.
He traces the embossed mantras along his prosthetic forearm with his real hand, feeling the raised sutras as if they were switches he could throw inside himself. The obstacles arrange themselves in his mind like stations along a parikrama, a circumambulation: each dangerous, each necessary, forming a circuit around something sacred and fragile at the center.
“Raghukul, Sharanam, Vaishnavi,” he murmurs under his breath, not as problem locations but as vows. If the emergent ecology truly spans them, then any honest science must span them too. Not from the safety of a sealed lab, but in person, with the people who live in those air volumes and drink that water.
Open confrontation is impossible: send in suited teams and the pattern shatters into quarantined fragments, each isolated, each easier to erase. Doing nothing is also a choice. One that leaves the lifeforms at the mercy of smugglers, neglect, and panicked protocol. Between those, a narrow third path appears: move quietly, with consent where he can earn it and stealth where he cannot yet risk the truth, and gather just enough understanding to argue for protection instead of purge.
He straightens, the phantom ache in his absent flesh arm flaring then settling as the decision lands. The checklist is no longer a list of reasons to abstain; it is a route, a discipline. For each knot of risk, a corresponding responsibility. If this is a heist, as his darker humor framed it earlier, then he will steal not for the corporation, but for the micro‑ecosystem itself. Steal time, data, and leverage in its favor.
Outside the shrine, Prithvi‑Parikrama keeps spinning, its compartments partitioned by class and contract. Inside, he lets one more partition fall. Whatever he signs, whatever secrecy he accepts, his real agreement is here: that he will not treat these anomalies as abstract hazards on a dashboard, but as beings whose first and perhaps only advocate he has just, in this quiet, agreed to become.
Necessity of secrecy accepted
He forces himself to follow the logic all the way out to its ugliest edges. Dispatching official teams with full quarantine protocols would mean armored suits fogging sanitizer over refugee kitchens, children herded past temporary bulkheads, elders ordered back from the very taps they repaired with their own hands. It would mean security cordons choking off colonist shrines in Raghukul, incense smoke and prayer flags suddenly classified as “bioaerosol risk,” whole berths frozen while someone in Vaishnavi debated whether to flush lines or evacuate bodies. The station would feel the clamp of lockdown before anyone even knew why, and by the time explanations caught up, the new life would already be a hazard code in a database.
Covert work, by contrast, lets him move before the definitions harden. Threading between shifts, piggybacking on legitimate inspections, borrowing Dev’s badge and casual authority in worker corridors, ghosting along the edges of Vaidisha’s patrol routes with her quiet consent. Long enough to understand what he’s touching before anyone else names it. The secrecy he hates becomes, in his own hands, the only way to keep the micro‑ecosystem from being condemned on sight, judged without ever being seen.
Ethical constraint on methods
He sets himself a constraint as firm as any lab protocol: whatever samples he takes must leave the larger web intact. No ripping whole clusters from hull fractures, no purging filters just to get a clean baseline, no shock-sterilizing a duct because it would simplify his models. Any intervention must be reversible without destabilizing Sharanam’s already‑precarious water loops or the temperamental scrubbers in Raghukul. The work must proceed as if the station itself were a patient whose unknown symbionts he is trying to preserve, not excise; biopsies, not amputations. That choice narrows his options, slows his timetable, forces him toward micro‑sampling, in situ observation, and messy data. It makes failure more likely. But it’s the only way he can sign and still recognize the man who carries rudraksha beads around his wrist.
Calculated risk of alienating all sides
He acknowledges, with a sour twist in his chest, that walking this line means losing the shelter of simple loyalties. If colonists catch him lifting samples in their ducts under corporate tags, whatever thin respect he’s earned as “not like the others” will curdle into open hostility. If security (or his own superiors) see him throttling back sterilization protocols, or detect his quiet diversion of raw data into personal encrypted channels, his badge will vanish and the project will fall to someone who thinks only in containment thresholds and liability charts. Even the emergent ecology could answer clumsy interference with its own form of reprisal: phase‑shifting biofilms, altered trace‑gas balances, some subtle chemical nudge that tips life‑support into a new, unforgiving equilibrium. The heist metaphor in his mind sharpens to a knife edge: he is not just stealing from factions; he is stealing time from catastrophe, wagering his name, his work, and the station’s fragile balance on the hope that he can get away with it.
Resolve hardens into conditional acceptance
The tallying itself becomes a ritual: scenarios sketched and crossed out on his inner display until only ugly branches remain. No path is clean; every choice implicates him. So the question shifts. Not “will I be complicit?” but “under what vows?” If they will move regardless, he will move first: writing in sampling limits, shared raw feeds, veto rights on sterilization protocols. His acceptance draft reads less like compliance and more like a provisional treaty, binding him to act as witness and advocate for an organism that cannot yet speak for itself. He isn’t escaping the snare; he’s re‑tying its knots, leaving just enough slack to maneuver.
The words of the directive hang in his vision for a few breaths longer, then he dismisses the overlay with a flick of prosthetic fingers. The shrine’s projected syllables keep flowing across the bulkhead, ॐ, नमः, repeated in soft light, casting their slow pulse over the ridges of his knuckles. He lets his organic hand rest on the temple rail, cool metal under warm skin, and forces himself to feel the contact point, the here and now, instead of the branching catastrophe trees his mind keeps sketching.
“Witness,” he murmurs, almost to the empty alcove. “Not executioner. Not bystander.”
The word steadies him more than he expects. He straightens minutely, back pressing against the cushion of the kneeling mat, and calls up a different set of overlays: telemetry traces from the last three hours. Hull microfracture signatures near Raghukul: phosphorescent curls of growth that brighten and dim in time with docking cycles, as if breathing with the station’s mechanical lungs. Trace-organic spikes in Sharanam’s greywater lines: not random contamination, but synchronized with meal times, prayer gatherings, power-saving downtimes. A faint, almost ghostlike pattern in the access shafts below Vaishnavi: signal so close to noise floor that only his anomaly filters even flag it.
On the shrine wall, an algorithmically perfect mantra loop scrolls on. On his visor, three jagged light-curves begin, slowly, to align.
“You’re already talking to each other,” he says, realizing he’s slipped into addressing the patterns. “Through us. Around us.”
With that framing, the directive he just reread becomes something else: not just a grab for samples, but an attempt, clumsy, extractive, to cut a network out of its substrate and lay it on a corporate altar. The thought makes his stomach clench. He remembers old case studies from Savitriya’s lectures: terraforming attempts that collapsed when someone treated an ecosystem as a parts list instead of a conversation.
His prosthetic thumb finds the embossed mantra on his forearm and traces the groove, metal on metal. “If I go in,” he tells the empty air, “it has to be as a translator. Not a butcher.”
Behind him, footsteps pass in the corridor, muted, then gone. No one interrupts. No supervisor pings his comm asking why his acceptance hasn’t been logged yet. For a rare moment, the station’s constant urgency recedes, leaving only the hush of air recyclers and the low buzz of the shrine’s projector.
He inhales, counting the beat off his pulse, and deliberately populates a new overlay: a crude, color-coded map of the station with three glowing veins. Raghukul in amber, Sharanam in blue, Vaishnavi in white. They look less like “sites” than organs in a shared body, stitched together by ducts and cables and human routines.
“We are all living inside someone else’s petri dish,” he thinks, not sure if it is meant as a joke. Either way, it sharpens his resolve. Doing nothing only hands the plate to the first impatient hand that reaches for it, corporate, colonist, desperate captain.
His knees twinge. He unfolds himself slowly, palms pressed to the mat in a gesture that is almost pranam, almost simply bracing to stand. The projection washes over his face one last time as he lifts his visor, ready to turn that cold piece of metal in his gut into sentences, conditions, and time bought. For the station, for the new life, and, if he is lucky, for his own conscience.
Conditions as mantra
He opens an encrypted reply draft and, instead of typing, starts by whispering each condition under his breath like a vow, letting the cadence settle his pulse. “Autonomous, read‑only tap into all xenobiology sensor feeds,” he murmurs, watching the words assemble themselves in corporate legalese on the overlay. “Personal, unmediated access to raw sample logs, all tiers.” “Veto power over non‑emergency sterilization within designated anomaly zones.” “Mandatory written concurrence from lead xenobiology before any quarantine order involving Sharanam or Raghukul is enacted.” Each phrase lands twice, once in spoken Sanskrit‑laced rhythm, once in clipped contractual English, until they feel less like demands and more like bindings he is placing on himself.
As each clause stabilizes, he drags it side‑by‑side with the standard directive boilerplate, aligning phrases, hunting for auto‑reject triggers. He trims the sharpest edges: “veto” softens to “required countersignature”; “unmediated” becomes “direct channel with audit log.” In their place he leaves hooks. Ambiguous qualifiers, cross‑references to obscure protocol annexes, reporting intervals that create quiet gaps in which he can move. The document starts to read like compliance, but in its joints he can see future leverage.
Testing the cage
He routes the draft through three layers of personal encryption before letting the corporate templates even sniff it, watching access flags and audit tags bloom like warning lichens in the margins. The system pushes back instantly, red‑lining his veto language, auto‑suggesting softer verbs, trying to swallow his “read‑only tap” inside generic “supervisory visibility.” Each time he accepts a revision, he slips in another sub‑clause, latency thresholds, independent checksum alerts, manual override on sensor calibration, small teeth hidden in bureaucratic gums.
Minutes stretch in the alcove as he iterates, lips moving soundlessly with each adjustment. By the time the algorithm stops protesting, the core has survived review: he won’t own the operation, but his credentials are hard‑coded into the monitoring stack and containment decision tree. It is, unmistakably, a cage. But one with a few bars loosened from the inside, just enough for a hand, or a signal, to pass through.
When he finally authorizes the transmission, the confirmation ping seems to crack the shrine’s hush, louder than the endless breath of the recyclers. A new clearance sigil irises open on his visor, stark and clinical: PROJECT: GAJANANA – PRINCIPAL XENOBIOLOGIST OF RECORD. No ceremony, only a terse acknowledgment from command and a stub for a “preliminary resourcing consult,” slotted into his calendar like any routine safety briefing. But the station responds more honestly than its masters: access tiers around his lab shuffle, security handshakes renegotiate in the background, and a thin, icy thread of previously redacted telemetry from hull microfractures and refugee‑adjacent vents begins to trickle into his feed. His acceptance has been logged; so has the weight of what he has agreed to see: and what he may no longer be allowed to ignore.
Turning from prayer to preparation
He palms his rudraksha beads once, anchoring himself, then disengages his mag‑boots and drifts out of the shrine, letting the corridor’s harsher light wash over him. As Vaishnavi’s sterile geometry reasserts itself, the “how” begins to crystallize: he’ll need eyes and hands in sectors his badge barely brushes. Someone who already lives in the gaps between official schematics and the real, wheezing airflow, someone whose unauthorized annotations keep surfacing at the margins of his freshly unlocked telemetry. Passing a viewport where auroral green ghosts the curve of Earth, he realizes he’s seen that exact hand in the data before: sharp, impatient corrections buried in filter logs, pattern notes no corporate tech would risk. By the time he re‑enters his lab and calls up maintenance rosters, one name has already settled, dense and inescapable, at the center of his thoughts: Dev Sharma.
Dev doesn’t sit. He hovers near the back of the console’s mag-rail, shoulders tight, as if ready to bolt if someone in a sharper uniform walks in.
“Reconciling which way?” he asks. His accent roughens the corporate Hindi, flattening vowels. “Up to your model, or up to what’s actually happening in the pipes?”
Kavitesh’s mouth quirks: almost a smile, mostly acknowledgement. “Ideally, to each other,” he says. “But for that, I need to know where the telemetry is… edited.”
He flicks two fingers; the holo between them blooms into a layered schematic of the station’s life-support corridors: neat corporate blue lines overlaid with Dev’s ragged, hand-drawn annotations in angry orange. Cooling loops. Filter banks. Places the official map ends and reality keeps going.
Dev’s eyes sharpen despite himself. “You pulled my scratch layers.”
“They were attached to maintenance tickets,” Kavitesh replies. “Marked as ‘non-standard commentary’ and hidden from the primary dashboards.” His prosthetic hand, gold inlays catching the lab light, rotates the display to highlight a cluster of orange marks around a coolant junction. “But not from the raw logs.”
Dev glances at the ceiling again. “You’re not supposed to see those.”
“I’m not supposed to ignore them when they correlate with anomalies,” Kavitesh says, softer now. He taps a control. The wall feed hums to life: a live xenobio view of a sealed sample: filamentous structures flexing in slow motion, refracting sensor light in colors that don’t quite map to any known spectrum.
Dev takes an involuntary half-step forward. “That’s… from where?”
“Worker coolant branch seventeen. Annotated by you as ‘unknown biofilm, recurring despite sterilization.’” Kavitesh looks at him rather than the screen. “You were correct. It’s not in any of our station libraries.”
Dev’s jaw works. “So why call me? You’ve got full teams up here. Better toys.” He nods toward the containment pane. “I’m just the guy they send in after a line bursts.”
“Because your ‘non-standard commentary’ marks every location where my models fail,” Kavitesh says. “Either you’re very lucky, or you understand parts of this station that my colleagues only see as error bars.” He tilts his head. “I don’t need a mop-up tech. I need someone who knows where the system is lying: and who it lies to first.”
Dev’s throat bobs. “Behavioral anomalies,” he repeats, a humourless huff escaping him. “That’s what they called it.”
“That’s what they buried it under,” Kavitesh corrects, enlarging the holo until the filamentous structures loom like a forest seen from within. He strips away the corporate overlays: no fault codes, no red‑amber‑green triage, just the raw spectral traces and Dev’s shy, jagged flags.
“You clocked recurrence intervals, growth fronts, response to temperature shifts.” He flicks through Dev’s time‑stamped comments: “comes back faster after heat‑flush,” “not same as old mold,” “seems to like junction seams.” “This isn’t mop‑up work. It’s field observation.”
Dev’s fingers tighten on the rail. “Field observation doesn’t count if it’s done in a cheap suit, sir. It’s ‘grit,’ not data.”
Kavitesh shakes his head. “Up here we call it ‘primary source.’” He lets that sit. “Your anomalies line up with my blind spots. Where you see something alive, my system sees noise and scrubs it.”
Dev snorts. “Your system sees what it’s paid to see.”
“Exactly,” Kavitesh says. “So I’m asking you to help me see what it’s not.”
With a few economical gestures of his prosthetic hand, servos whirring softly under synth-skin, Kavitesh calls up a buried telemetry layer from laborer‑deck coolant lines and scrubber feeds. Graphs bloom along the console arc: jagged flow rates, microtemperature shifts, biofilm densities. No names. Only anonymized asset IDs and work‑unit codes. Then, deliberately, he peels back another layer. One by one, the faint annotation marks Dev has been sneaking into maintenance logs, tiny amber pennants, out‑of‑spec question marks, muttered comments compressed into three‑character tags, prickle into view along the traces where supervisors always click past.
“These patterns don’t match any sanctioned model,” he says, voice low. He isolates a knot of irregular microbial bloom signatures, extrudes them into a rotating three‑dimensional holo. “Somebody kept relabeling them ‘behavioral anomaly’ instead of ‘fault.’ That somebody is you.”
Dev’s shoulders knot under the cheap coverall fabric; his gaze flicks to the shaded ceiling corners where cams nest like metal spiders, then to the door status icon pulsing green, his only proof they’re not already sealed in. “Those flags are for internal diagnostics,” he hedges, outer‑ring vowels rough with distrust. “If you pulled them, you pulled my performance reviews too. That’s how it starts: one ‘behavioral anomaly’ ticket, then a panel, then I’m the boy who ‘tampered’ with blessed corporate plumbing.” The word tampered lands bitter, but beneath the anger a reluctant spark catches: this is the first time anyone with clearance has treated his muttered three‑character tags as data instead of insubordination.
Instead of pressing, Kavitesh drops his gaze and leans back from the console, a deliberate show of uncurling his prosthetic fingers and ghosting his credentials out of the active layer while leaving the anomaly holo turning slowly between them. “I’m not here to report you,” he says quietly. “The system is lying to both of us, and your off‑record annotations are the only honest part of these logs.” He nudges the image of the irregular blooms until faint rhythmic pulses and phase‑locked flickers stand out in the spectral bands. “I need someone who actually knows where the numbers stop matching reality. You can walk out, or you can tell me what you’ve been seeing.” Suspicion still sharpening his jawline, Dev doesn’t move for the door.
Dev glances at the holo, then at Kavitesh, and snorts softly. “You really don’t see it?”
Before waiting for permission, he leans in, shoulder brushing the edge of Kavitesh’s chair, and reaches past the xenobiologist’s left side. The console wakes instantly under his touch, as if it has done this a hundred times before. His fingers move in tight, economical bursts over keys and haptic pads, skipping past warning glyphs, dismissing credential prompts with macros that definitely do not belong to his pay grade.
“You’re pulling archived logs,” he mutters. “Half the story. Look here.”
He dives into a buried ops subroutine, the sort of thing only shift leads should access, then skirts around the access wall with a sideways gesture and a quick string of text commands. A new viewport opens with a sullen chime: a live feed from a worker‑deck air‑scrubber loop, tagged blandly as ROUTINE_MAINT_7B. The status bar glows a calm, corporate green. Auto‑summary: ALL PARAMETERS WITHIN TOLERANCE.
“’Routine maintenance,’” Dev mimics, his accent dragging the words a little flat. “Which means nobody with a badge like yours is watching it right now. Perfect place for something to grow teeth.”
He flicks a glance up at the door indicator, still comfortably green, then at the shadowed corners. The cams remain motionless, their indicator LEDs steady. Satisfied enough to keep going, he pins the live scrubber feed alongside the spinning holo Kavitesh had summoned, then drills deeper, bypassing the glossy graphical widgets in favor of raw text and code.
“You know what your people did when these loops started throwing weird deltas?” Dev asks, not really expecting an answer. Lines of telemetry roll down the side panel like incantations. “They told the system to smooth them. ‘Auto‑normalize.’” He snorts again. “You can’t see pattern if you keep telling the machine to lie for you.”
He pulls his hands back just long enough to flex his cramped fingers, then dives in once more, thumb tapping a sequence so fast it blurs. A narrow cursor jumps to a maintenance-script directory that shouldn’t be visible from a research console at all. For a heartbeat, a red lock glyph flashes, then blinks out as Dev feeds in a short, ugly command string clearly typed from memory.
“Relax,” he says without looking at Kavitesh. “I’m not breaching your god‑level vaults. Just borrowing a mirror.” A new line appears: LINK: LIVE_LOOP_7B_DIAG_RAW. Dev taps it open. The clean corporate graph dissolves into coarse numbers and time stamps. The feed stutters, then resumes in a more granular, less forgiving form. “There. This is what we see, when we’re the ones who have to go in and breathe whatever’s in those ducts.”
“Watch,” he says, already killing the default visualization with a couple of sharp keystrokes. The sleek holo‑graph gutters out, leaving bare gridlines for half a second before he floods them with his own tools. In its place he splices in a rough, text‑only script from his personal storage (file name a jumble of slang and shift codes) then another, uglier one patched together from deprecated diagnostics he was never supposed to keep.
For a moment the station’s polished UI jitters like it’s rejecting a foreign body. Icons smear, warning triangles flash and vanish, and the cursor lags as if pushing through syrup. Dev mutters something under his breath, thumbs in a manual override, and the resistance breaks. The console stops fighting him and begins to chew on the new instructions.
“Come on, come on,” he urges.
The baseline graph peels back layer by layer. Behind it, a different picture assembles: a ghost‑map of micro‑temperature shifts and trace gas spikes, knitting itself into a faint, pulsing lattice that spills off the console and onto the nearest wall display, wrapping the lab in a dim, breathing web of light.
The corporate dashboard beneath still glows a soothing, dishonest green, every metric hugging its tolerance band like a prayer flag pinned in a storm. Dev raps the ‘acceptable’ line with a knuckle, the sound small but sharp in the cleanroom hush, then sweeps his hand at the breathing lattice crawling over wall and console. “Their tools are blind on purpose,” he says. “Noise eats budget. So they teach the system to pretend it’s not there.” He pinches‑zooms into a worker junction node, adding resolution layer by reluctant layer. What was background shimmer tightens: first a jitter, then a directional pulse, then a clean, traveling wave that migrates along ducts and coolant veins as if the station itself is learning to circulate a thought.
As he drives the resolution higher, the shimmer locks into a hard, cardiac rhythm, phase‑linked across vents and coolant veins that should be thermally independent. Dev jerks his chin at the anomaly holo still slowly tumbling above the console. “Your hull‑fracture plates?” he says. “Same beat, same lag on the rise. That’s signaling, not sludge. It’s talking through our plumbing.” His voice lands flat, more like a diagnosis than a victory, the sound of someone whose worst suspicion has just been confirmed.
For a moment, the only sound is the hum of the lab and the soft tick of Dev’s script caching a copy into his own buffer, a small act of insurance. Kavitesh realizes that in under five minutes, Dev has hijacked a supposedly routine environmental loop and turned it into a live xenobiological probe, extending his carefully bounded lab work out into the station’s hidden arteries without asking permission. Dev steps back from the console, jaw set, eyes searching Kavitesh’s face as if weighing how quickly it will close down. “So now you know what I’m worth,” he says quietly. “The question is what you plan to do with it. And with us.”
Kavitesh doesn’t answer Dev’s accusation right away. The words hang there, heavier than the filtered air, and under them he can hear the polished version he’s sat through in closed‑door briefings: phased evacuations, prioritized zones, “sacrifice envelopes” around non‑critical sectors. You never say whose lives are inside those envelopes. You just watch the color blocks drain off the map.
“Sab ki galti in logon ki thi.” It lands in his chest like a stamp he’s already half‑earned by putting on a corporate badge.
Instead of defending himself, he exhales once, slow, and steps closer to the console. The cleanroom light skims the gold inlays along his prosthetic fingers as he lifts his hand; the embedded haptics buzz faintly as they handshake with the interface. With a deliberate flex and twist, he peels back his own access layer on the project file.
The dashboard skin ripples. The soothing greens and tidy graphs collapse into a scaffold of code and permissions. The main display shudders, then reconfigures: the bland “Environmental Variance Study – Tier B” header shrinks to a corner, displaced by a dense pane of fine‑print legalese, nested flags, and hidden subroutine trees that most staff never see.
He doesn’t look at Dev yet. “You’re right about what they usually do,” he says quietly. “About who they usually blame.”
He drags a cursor through the authorization blocks; the interface resists for a heartbeat, then yields to his biometrics. Lines of text brighten: escalation protocols, automated hazard responses keyed to color‑coded risk levels, incident‑report routing chains that bypass worker councils entirely. Another gesture fans out suppressed audit tags along the bottom of the holo. Little red and amber sigils that mark where standard policy has been overridden or rewritten.
Buried in the middle of the pane, a clause glows faint corporate gold: Section 9.[^3]: discretionary sterilization authority delegated to Principal Investigator and Corporate Risk Council… Another, deeper down: Section 11.[^7]: proprietary transformation and exclusive ownership of all derived datasets and analytical models…
He highlights both with a sharp snap of his prosthetic fingers, letting the emphasis hang there between them like an indictment. Only then does he shift the display again, angling his wrist so Dev can’t miss the next transition.
“This,” he says, “is what my access level thinks I agreed to.”
A small icon in the corner, his personal sigil, a stylized double helix wrapped around an Om glyph, pulses as he calls up a second layer. Color bleeds across the legal pane; the gold tints drain away, replaced by a cooler, neutral gray. A header appears that never shows on standard terminals: Sealed Addendum – Individual Contract Modifications (K. Rao) – Confidential.
Dev’s eyes narrow behind his glasses. The outer‑ring accent is stripped from his silence now; this is the technician who reads error logs at three in the morning because nobody else will. He leans in, tracking the subtle differences in layout, the non‑corporate color scheme.
“These lines,” Kavitesh says, tapping a trio of clauses that stand out by their different hash stamps, “are not from the template.”
He keeps his voice plain, almost flat, the opposite of a sales pitch. “I was offered a promotion track and a guaranteed lab slot for five years. I turned that down and asked for three things instead.”
He pings the first modified clause. The text expands, unfurling a schematic of data pathways that split like arterial branches. “Mirrored raw data buffers, keyed to my credentials only. Every environmental and xenobio stream this project touches gets written twice. Once to the official vault, once to a shadow buffer I control. They can’t alter their copy without forensically scarring mine.”
The second clause flares as he selects it. A diagram of the station overlays the text, blotched with potential “sterilization envelopes” in muted red. “Technical veto on any automated purge routine linked to our project ID. If a script tries to trigger a sterilize‑and‑vent sequence based on our flags, it pauses in my queue. It does not execute without my explicit override.”
He swallows, feeling the old nervousness creep at the edge of his meditation‑honed calm. “On paper, that makes me the choke point between ‘anomaly’ and ‘flush that deck.’ It’s not as much as I wanted, but it is a delay. A space to argue.”
The third clause is drier, but to him it was the most important to win. He brings it forward: “Mandatory anonymization of origin sectors in all preliminary incident reports and analytical summaries. Until we have formal causal attribution no one can say ‘this came from Laborer Deck C‑Four’ or ‘from Sharanam graywater.’ They get coordinates scrubbed to ring‑level only.”
He lets the words sit. Dev’s reflection wavers in the holo, jaw working, eyes flicking across hash IDs and legal markers. The tension in the room hasn’t gone, but it’s changed flavor. Less accusation, more wary assessment.
“So yes,” Kavitesh says, finally meeting his gaze. “I am inside their system. And these concessions don’t make me clean. But they mean if they try to use our work to point at your people and say ‘sab ki galti in logon ki thi,’ they have to go through me. Through this.” His prosthetic fingers tap the gray‑coded addendum.
He turns the display fully toward Dev, then steps back half a pace. “You wanted to know what I plan to do with what you’ve shown me,” he says. “First, I plan to make sure neither you nor your decks vanish into a red envelope without us seeing it coming in the data. And second, ” he nods toward the mirrored buffer diagram “, I plan to make sure that if they try, they don’t get to control the story.”
“This is what my access badge says I bowed to,” he murmurs, voice steady but with a tightness Dev hasn’t heard before.
He magnifies the clause about discretionary sterilization authority, the neutral font suddenly obscene when isolated. A second gesture pulls up proprietary transformation of all derived datasets, the language that turns whatever they discover into something the corporation can twist, patent, bury. Both lines glow in corporate gold, smug and unblinking.
Then he flicks his wrist. The interface hesitates, then peels back like a second skin. A hidden icon, his personal contract sigil, unlocks a view Dev has never been allowed to see: Sealed Addendum – K. Rao. The palette shifts; the gold drains to a muted gray, hash stamps change, margins lose the corporate branding.
Dev’s eyes sharpen. These aren’t boilerplate. Someone argued for every sentence.
Kavitesh keeps his explanation bare. No grand speeches, just numbered points: he refused the promotion ladder and demanded three things in writing. Mirrored raw data buffers keyed to his biometrics. A hard interlock that forces any purge script tied to their project to stall on his desk. And a binding requirement that early reports strip out specific deck and sector identifiers until causality is proved.
Dev leans in despite himself, scanning the lines with a tech’s practiced speed, mouth moving silently as he parses hash IDs and routing trees. “Mirrored buffers” isn’t just jargon; it means a second spine of truth running alongside the official record, one they might not be able to amputate cleanly. “Override on sterilization” means any attempt to wipe worker decks under this project’s flag would have to shove past a logged conflict with Kavitesh’s authorization key: a scar in the audit trail.
When Kavitesh adds, almost awkward, “And I can write you in as co‑investigator on the analysis pipeline,” Dev’s first impulse is to scoff. It still leaves final say with corporate review boards, with people who’ve never smelled coolant mold in a failing scrubber. But he also recognizes what most laborers never see outside rumor: named, queryable credit tied to his ID; formal responsibility clauses that acknowledge his role; a contractual paper trail that could be subpoenaed or splashed across public feeds if things go bad. It’s not safety. But it’s leverage: more than whispered complaints in a break bay, more than a ghost account poking at restricted logs in the off‑shift.
The silence stretches, filled only by the soft ping of the logging script rolling over into a fresh buffer, each tick a timestamped witness. Dev rubs a hand over his face, the fatigue of too many double‑shifts and clandestine assays catching up with him, grimed nails stark against tired skin. “You understand they’ll still try to spin it,” he says, voice rough. “They’ll say the contamination spread because some mechanic skipped a seal check, not because your people cut maintenance budgets and locked us out of proper parts.”
Kavitesh doesn’t look away. “I can’t promise how they’ll spin it. I can only promise what I’ll sign my name to: and what data exists for you to leak, if you choose.” He pulls a slim data tab from a side port and sets it on the console edge, a quiet acknowledgment that Dev won’t be operating entirely inside the corporate net, that the mirrored buffer will have a second, human mirror in Dev’s pocket.
Dev stares at the tab, then at the clauses hanging like judgment above the console. He thinks of fungus‑slick filter mats under his nails, kids in Sharanam coughing beneath “acceptable thresholds,” and how fast yellow quarantine seals appear when upper rings get spooked. When he finally speaks, the sarcasm is gone, tempered into something denser. “All right,” he says. “You get my telemetry, my routes, my people’s stories: on the record. In return, I get full visibility. No scrubbed logs, no dark buffer where they decide we’re expendable.” His jaw knots. “And if I catch even one move to pin this on laborers for what’s already breeding in their walls, I don’t go to your ethics board. I go public. Full dump. Names, sectors, your seal clause and all. They weaponize this against us, I weaponize you against them.”
For a heartbeat neither moves. Then Dev wipes his palm once on his stained coveralls and offers it, fingers steady. Kavitesh clasps it, the contact brief but unmistakably formal: a pact welded from leverage and mutual liability as much as from trust.
At first the telemetry is more personality than data. Packets arrive double‑stamped, out of order, sometimes piggybacking on innocuous filter‑maintenance reports. Whole chunks are just image captures of rust‑streaked pipe joints with Dev’s voiceover, low and furious: “Variance ignored since 12.[^4]. You lot signed off on this.” Others are raw hex dumps where he hasn’t had time to build a parser, smeared with his text tags: “CO₂ climb / kid coughing / scrubber ‘within tolerance’ my ass.”
Kavitesh resists the urge to clean it before ingest. Instead he writes small translators, teaching Vaishnavi’s modeling suite how to read Dev’s improvised formats. Miscalibrated CO₂ sensors become probability bands. Hacked flow meters turn into jagged time‑series, cross‑indexed with official maintenance tickets that never mention the spikes. The jury‑rigged biofilm samplers, adhesive patches stuck where no corporate protocol would bother, yield fluorescence curves he can align against his own culture plates.
On one wall of his lab pod a live map blossoms, ugly and beautiful: specks of Dev’s “garbage data” pinned to ventilation tags and coolant loops, overlaid with spectral fingerprints from hull‑fracture scrap he’d nearly filed away as an anomaly. A narrow emission peak (previously just a curiosity in one vacuum‑burned shard) shows up, again and again, in Dev’s samples from worker coolant returns. Same width, same shoulder. Different decks, same song.
“That’s creep,” Dev says on a vidlink, jabbing a stained finger toward the map feed from some cramped access crawl. “Shows up where it shouldn’t, eats what it shouldn’t, screws who it shouldn’t.”
“It’s not a fungus, not a classic biofilm, not, ” Kavitesh starts, only to have Dev cut in, “It’s killing filters and making kids wheeze; I don’t care what bin you stick it in.”
He does care. Names imply hierarchies, kinships, dangers. In his notes he tries out cautious constructs and hates each, feeling them flatten what the patterns suggest.
The argument loops for three whole exchanges, growing quieter rather than louder. Dev refuses “some Latin mouthful that pretends it’s tame.” Kavitesh refuses “creep” because it erases complexity and intent. Eventually, exhausted, he drags their shared cluster of scripts and maps into a new directory and types a compromise neither of them has to like.
NETWORK_CANDIDATE_01
He pushes access to Dev. A few seconds later another label appears in the metadata, appended without comment from the worker decks: “a.k.a. creep.”
As the dataset grows, their exchanges fall into an unspoken rhythm keyed to station clocks: Dev calling in at the tail end of a maintenance shift, coveralls streaked with coolant and biogel, perched half‑sideways in some cramped access cul‑de‑sac; Kavitesh answering between containment checks, lab coat half‑sealed, AR visor pushed up into his hair, eyes rimmed red but sharply focused.
They pick at each other’s blind spots like old arguments. Dev scoffs at “sterile‑pod thinking” that assumes filters are swapped exactly on schedule, not cannibalized from one deck to keep another barely breathing. He narrates the way a tech will bypass a clogged line because no one logged spare parts that week. Kavitesh counters, gently but insistently, that three horror stories don’t make a trend, that without baselines and controls they’re just scaring themselves.
Yet each new overlay tightens the same conclusion. Worker ducts, refugee vents, hull scars: the signal repeats. It rides pressure gradients, sugar traces from leaked nutrient lines, the electromagnetic hum of old pump motors, knitting a ghost‑map along the station’s neglected veins. Awe and dread arrive together, inseparable.
When a correlation heatmap lights up corridors Dev knows as unofficial refugee thoroughfares, he stops mid‑sentence. “If this hits security feeds looking like a ‘cluster,’ they’ll call it a hygiene problem and start evacuations,” he says, voice flat, eyes suddenly distant in a way that has nothing to do with signal lag.
Kavitesh feels protocol tighten like a harness, flag anomalous bioactivity, escalate to risk management, let Security and Medical fight it out, but under it he hears Dev’s earlier ultimatum, the threat of a data dump dragged into public view. His cursor hovers over the incident‑report template, then slides away. Instead he opens a shared planning slate.
“We need context before alarms,” he concedes. “Patterns, not targets.”
Together they sketch a crude overlay: xenobiological pathways in one color, human movement patterns in another, corporate surveillance blind spots in a third, Dev annotating from memory, “family sleep pods here, canteen line here”, while Kavitesh drags in security‑grid metadata.
The composite looks disturbingly like an unacknowledged circulatory system, pulsing through metal: one flow for the station’s underclass, another for the organism they’re tracking, both using the same neglected capillaries.
It’s Dev who first says they need someone who can cross social membranes the way the organism crosses structural ones. “You and I walk into colonist docks together, we’re either a raid or a health inspection,” he says. “Either way, everyone lies, shuts doors, or cleans too hard.” He mentions the Sargam Free‑Float Hub almost offhandedly at first, “my cousin’s kid goes there, says people actually listen to each other without checking badges first.” The name jolts half‑forgotten memos in Kavitesh’s mind: risk‑management footnotes about “informal ethical discourse,” red‑flagged by Legal and then quietly ignored. He scrolls back through internal briefs until a face resolves. Realizing he’s been skimming past precisely the kind of connector they lack, he suggests approaching her as an advisor rather than a subject or recruitment target, framing their work as a shared problem instead of a proprietary project. Dev snorts, mutters something about “teacher‑types loving to talk,” but doesn’t say no. The concession: that an outsider, answerable to no department, might be the only one who can translate their findings into something the station can hear without instantly weaponizing it: marks their first genuinely shared strategic decision, a vector chosen together rather than inherited from corporate protocol or worker resentment.
They time it for a lull between shift bells, catching a neutral shuttle whose cabin smells of metal, boot‑rubber, and cardamom steam from someone’s thermos. Students in mismatched harnesses bounce questions off one another in low voices; Dev stays wordless, jaw tight, pretending to study a bulkhead schematic while his hands betray him with every lurch.
Kavitesh keeps his prosthetic fingers deliberately relaxed around a ceiling loop, forcing his breath into the metronome cadence he uses before difficult procedures. Out the narrow viewport, Prithvi‑Parikrama’s jumble of rings and trusses recedes, replaced by the fragile spider‑limb silhouette of the Sargam Hub.
Transition clamps thud; gravity lets go. Dev’s practiced deck‑swagger disintegrates into a graceless pinwheel until he snags a handhold, cheeks darkening as a teenager offers quiet, amused guidance.
By contrast, Kavitesh’s movements are technically correct but over‑controlled, as if he were afraid to disturb the air itself. His AR visor floats crooked, caught between hair and temple until he tucks it down, more shield than tool.
They drift through the connecting tube into Sargam’s central sphere: a hollow planetarium of slow‑turning holos (nutrient cycles, traffic flows, stylized mandalas of station ecology) all gently pulsing to an unheard beat. Here, up and down dissolve; only relation remains.
Savitriya is already anchored at a mid‑sphere rail, tunic panels fanning around her like a patient comet tail. She studies them with a teacher’s assessing stillness, gaze ticking from corporate insignia to oil‑shadows on Dev’s sleeves to the way they unconsciously mirror each other’s cautious grip on nearby loops.
The contrast lands harder in this weightless democracy: Kavitesh’s fitted blue with its pristine ID glyphs and gold‑inlaid prosthetic catching projection light like temple brass; Dev’s gray coveralls etched in coolant stains and micro‑burns, his badge clipped at an angle to hide the “temporary contractor” stripe. The vowels in his greeting stretch toward corporate standard and snap back, dock‑ring cadence refusing to be scrubbed out.
He clears his throat, drawing breath for the careful, committee‑vetted explanation they’d sketched on the shuttle. Before the first clause can leave his mouth, Savitriya lifts two fingers, the same motion she uses to quiet an over‑eager student.
“Not to me,” she says mildly, then widens the gesture to encompass the ring of anchored figures around them. Laborer teens, a colonist quartermaster on off‑cycle, a junior analyst in borrowed boots. “To them. Tell us why this should matter to someone who will never see a bonus line or their name on a lab door.”
A murmur ripples through the circle as students tug themselves into steadier perches, curiosity overtaking politeness. Dev shoots Kavitesh a startled, almost accusatory look: you didn’t say it would be public.
Kavitesh feels the familiar scaffold of corporate framing fall away, leaving only the raw shape of what they have found and what it might do. He hears his own earlier argument echoing back at him, patterns, not targets, and realizes this is the first test of whether he can speak that truth without hiding behind protocols.
The class disperses in gentle bursts of motion, students kicking off toward side modules in pairs and trios, leaving the central sphere strangely hushed. The last echo of a question, something about whether an ecosystem can have “rights”, fades into the soft rustle of harness straps and the click of mag‑boots on distant rails.
Savitriya unhooks her teaching bands with unhurried movements, the thin holo‑threads dimming from bright schematic lines to faint afterimages on her skin. She palms the bands into standby and tucks them into a belt loop, then inclines her head toward a smaller adjoining cylinder. “This way,” she says, not quite an invitation, not quite an order.
Dev hesitates a fraction of a second, glancing back at the central sphere as if it’s safer to stay under the collective gaze than step into a private conversation that might cost him more than sleep cycles. Kavitesh catches the flicker, then follows Savitriya through the hatch, one hand on the frame to steady the transition from open sphere to narrow tube. Dev comes after, bumping his shoulder on the rim, muttering an apology to the metal itself.
Inside, sound‑baffling panels and dimmer lamps turn the space into a cocoon. The ambient station hum drops to a low, almost bodily thrum. Faded diagrams of early orbital habitats, cylindrical farms, skeletal trusses around patched‑together canisters, peel at the edges, corners lifting in slow, lazy curls. Someone has traced new lines over them in pen: extra modules, improbable gardens, a child’s messy ring of stars. A reminder that every “system” began as somebody’s improvisation, not a decree from on high.
She anchors herself at a wall rail and doesn’t speak. The quiet stretches, a deliberate vacuum. Kavitesh feels the urge to rush into it with a practiced briefing; Dev fidgets, datapad turning slowly between his hands.
Savitriya waits, gaze moving from one to the other, measuring not rank but readiness. The silence lengthens until it is clear they must strip their story of department codes and euphemism, speak from the part of themselves that will live with the consequences. Or not speak at all.
Dev breaks first, the words coming out faster than the air recyclers’ steady hiss. He hooks his toes under a floor strap to stop the tiny drift his agitation keeps inducing, then flips his datapad into projection mode with a sharp thumb‑flick. Lines of the station’s underbelly bloom between them: life‑support trunks, worker decks, little red flags where his own unofficial notes live.
“Conditions,” he says, voice rougher now that the classroom politeness has dropped away. A jab of his stylus zooms in on a tangle of ducts. “No shutting down corridors because some manager gets spooked. No ‘operator error’ in the official story unless I sign my name to the technical cause. In three languages, if I have to.”
He stabs new markers into the holo: “Deferred maintenance. Budget cuts. Faked sign‑offs.” Each phrase sharpens his rhythm. “Anything we find that shows this,” he adds, “I keep mirrored copies. My buffer, off your grid. You don’t edit, you don’t disappear it.”
Behind the bargaining, his real stance is simpler, almost brutal in its clarity: if this whole thing runs across laborer systems and bodies, then laborers will not be offered up when something finally fails.
Kavitesh waits until Dev’s anger has burned down to a tight‑jawed simmer, the stylus hovering motionless above the projection. Only then does he speak, his Hindi‑English cadence slow enough that each clause has room to settle. He doesn’t look at either of them at first, only at the ghost‑station spinning between them: coolant coils traced in faint blue, hairline hull fractures in flickering white, the tiny pulsing nodes where his models say something is… coordinating.
He lays it out: filaments braided through coolant, blooms that recur in specific stress‑patterns, correlations that stop looking like noise and start looking like choice. “I won’t see this turned into another extraction protocol,” he says. “If we call it an ecology, we commit to its wholeness. No carve‑outs for some outer‑belt buyer, no scorch‑clean sweeps because a dashboard spikes red.”
His gaze drops to his prosthetic hand, gold mantras catching the holo‑glow. When he continues, his voice is quieter, the confession aimed more at himself than at them. Pressure will come. From his division head, from risk officers, from unlogged visitors with polite smiles. He knows his own reflex to fold complicated truths into acceptable reports.
“So I’m asking you,” he finishes, finally meeting their eyes in turn, “to be the line I won’t always see. If you catch me translating wonder into compliance, you say it. On record. You don’t let me pretend I didn’t.”
Savitriya listens with her usual stillness, head tilted as if weighing not only their words but the slow slide of responsibility between them. When she finally answers, it is in the dry, patient tone of someone used to restating what others pretend not to have said. She will not, she makes clear, sign NDAs, loyalty clauses, or “harmless” collaboration charters; her accountability runs to a learning community that stretches across half the station, not to any logo. If they encounter behavior that looks like coordinated signaling, niche‑construction, boundary‑maintaining exchange, or anything edging toward self‑modeling, the project’s vocabulary must change. No more “assets,” “loads,” “biofouling,” or “noise.” In every log, proposal, and emergency protocol, the default term becomes “neighbor”: and neighbors are not removed, isolated, or probed without seeking consent, however clumsy and approximate that first attempt at asking must be.
The mood in the module tightens as those terms settle, like gravity edging up a fraction. Each of them has put a ghost at the table: Dev speaks for workers who will breathe whatever coolant line they tamper with; Kavitesh, for organisms that answer only in altered gradients and filament maps; Savitriya, for future students arguing precedent from whatever logs survive this work. They accept, no seals, no countersignatures, that any move jeopardizing those absentees counts as breaking faith. When they unhook and drift back toward shuttle spines and security choke‑points, they are not merely three freelancers courting trouble, but the first, fragile outline of a covenant the rest of Prithvi‑Parikrama has not yet named.
The meeting that cements this fourth vector doesn’t happen in a lab or a shrine, but in a bland Vaishnavi conference cell with privacy fields humming at half-strength. No idols in the corner alcove here, just a recessed terminal, a carafe of synth‑chai nobody has touched, and a viewport set to opaque. The door seals with a soft click behind her; the room smells faintly of ozone and recirculated air, like every other “neutral consultation space” on the ring.
The “embedded oversight” packet had hit her queue two shifts earlier, slotted between a report on a minor scuffle in a ration line and an unsigned note about contraband spores found in a locker near the docks. At first glance it looked like a routine escalation: risk review, oversight request, the usual drizzle of corporate platitudes about “compliance alignment” and “stakeholder reassurance.” She’d almost archived it with the rest of the week’s paper‑shuffling.
But then the auto‑generated incident map came up: a constellation of time‑stamped nodes, each representing an access event. Dev Sharma’s diagnostics pings threading through worker life‑support, red‑flagged for frequency and depth. Kavitesh’s logins clustering at corridor junctions one bulkhead away from Sharanam’s main spine. A separate layer, pale gold, marking “unstructured consults” with an independent educator whose ID she recognized from half a dozen quiet mediation cases: BOS‑SAV‑774.
She killed the default 3‑D rotation and flattened the map into decks and rings, aligning it with the routes refugees used when official corridors were blocked. The overlap sharpened. This wasn’t idle curiosity or one‑off shortcuts; someone had been walking the same arcs she patrols, just out of uniform, sampling air and coolant and God‑knows‑what else.
Her jaw tightened. On another day, in another mood, she might have tagged it as a security risk and handed it upwards, let some higher‑ranked officer turn it into a pretext for sweeps and “containment exercises” on the annex. But the flagged descriptors, “uncharacterized bloom,” “non‑standard filament behavior”, echoed unlogged calls she’d answered at Sharanam: residents talking about lights that moved in the washroom vents, a slick that shimmered against the airflow and then was gone.
She scrolled through the boilerplate once more, slower this time. Every sentence was drafted to sound protective but vague enough to weaponize: safeguard, quarantine, temporary relocation. She imagined those words dropped into a crisis briefing, fused with the map of overlapping access, pointed at her people as an epidemiological risk.
No.
Her fingers hovered over the response field for a moment, then tapped out the formal request for assignment. She cited her history with biohazard false positives in refugee sectors, her familiarity with Sharanam’s improvised plumbing, her language access. The text was dry, unassailable; no emotion for an algorithm to flag. But under the justifications, her intent was simple: if a badge was going to stand between these three and a security lockdown, it would be hers.
She attached an addendum, carefully worded: given the “socio‑political sensitivities” of annex‑adjacent operations, embedded oversight from someone with direct community ties was “strongly recommended.” It read like prudence. It was, in fact, a line in the sand.
When she hit send, the privacy field in her quarters flared a shade darker, reacting to her elevated heart rate. She exhaled, long and slow, letting the surge pass. Somewhere in Vaishnavi’s clean corridors, a routing daemon shifted a color‑coded tag from “general pool” to “pre‑assigned.” Somewhere else, a risk officer would see her name and think: useful, compliant, already proven at keeping the annex quiet.
They were not entirely wrong. She did keep things quiet. She just intended that, this time, “quiet” would mean no sudden cordons around Sharanam, no evac orders disguised as humanitarian concern. If there was a new kind of life winding itself through the station’s bones, she would see it with her own eyes before anyone used it as an excuse to uproot hers.
When she steps into their first joint briefing, armor plates still scuffed from gate duty at Sharanam and a faint trace of disinfectant clinging to her jumpsuit, the room’s temperature seems to drop a notch. The privacy field hum settles into a tighter pitch; even the synth‑chai steam curls lower.
Kavitesh, already clipped into a wall anchor beside the recessed display, starts with the official script he’d rehearsed on the way over, “preliminary cross‑sector xenobiological survey,” “risk mitigation for uncharacterized micro‑ecologies,” “enhanced incident‑response liaison.” His voice edges toward the corporate cadence without his consent.
She stops him with a raised hand, palm angled just enough to show the security seal on her gauntlet. “No,” she says, gaze traveling from his polished badge to Dev’s stained laborer overalls to the cool glint of Savitriya’s neutral teaching bands. “Plain language. Where have you already gone, and who’s been breathing what you’re tracking?”
The silence after that is different: not awkward, but stripped. Dev’s jaw works; Savitriya’s eyes flick toward the opaque viewport, as if mapping people behind bulkheads. Forced off their euphemisms, they start naming actual routes, ducts, and decks. Worker recirculation nodes, annex washrooms, cargo throats near Raghukul. By the time Kavitesh finishes tracing those paths on the shared display, their off‑book work lies on the table like a schematic of exposure, all its protective jargon peeled away.
She doesn’t soften. “You want my oversight, these are the terms,” she continues, each word measured. “You log something near Sharanam, you log it with me in the loop. No retroactive edits to make refugees look dirty or reckless. If command wants language, they can argue it to my face.” Her gaze holds on Kavitesh until it’s clear she is addressing him as an equal, not a subordinate. The audacity should be career‑suicidal from someone with refugee origins and a lower clearance band, but she offers it as a fact of physics, not rebellion. For a moment Kavitesh thinks of corporate org charts, then of the shimmer he’d seen on a refugee‑sector vent grille. He hears, in her conditions, another mandate: do not turn these people into a petri dish.
Dev’s first reaction is visceral distrust. He slouches back, boots hooking under the table rail, eyes raking over the embossed geometry of her prosthetic leg and the security insignia on her chest like they’re both weapons. “Last time security took an interest in ‘air‑quality anomalies’ on worker decks, we got three days of curfew and a hygiene sermon,” he says, outer‑ring accent sharpening. “You understand why I don’t want another set of eyes on my terminal, logging what I touch and where I walk?” She doesn’t argue policy, doesn’t flash procedures or chain of command; instead she scrolls on her slate and throws a series of raw incident codes onto the shared display, short, jagged spikes of “BIOHAZARD ALERT” originating in Sharanam washrooms, followed within hours by quiet status edits downgrading them to “SENSOR ERROR,” no inspection logs, no swabs, nothing. “Refugees reported ‘shimmering mold’ on stall seams the same day these hit,” she says, voice flat. “I know because I was the one who filed the override to force a physical check.” She flicks to the next screen: auto‑closure signatures, all from a higher clearance band. “Two days later, the tickets vanished from my queue. That’s not my work. That’s someone upstream deciding what doesn’t officially exist. And who stays blameable if it goes wrong.”
The room’s alignment shifts. Dev leans in despite himself, matching the erased alerts to midnight readings he’d written off as ghosts in bad wiring. Savitriya, recalling hushed Annex confessions, names the pattern: refugees see it first, workers breathe it next, corporate logs erase the trail. “You’re already inside this corridor,” she tells Vaidisha quietly. “With us or without us.” Kavitesh adds his own stake: an elastic mandate, models starving for Dev’s black‑box data, an ethical frame he can’t hold alone. Piece by piece, the vectors lock: his sanctioned access, Dev’s subterranean telemetry, Savitriya’s cross‑faction trust, and Vaidisha’s reach through security feeds and refugee whispers. They leave the briefing not as a chain of command but as intersecting obligations, each answerable to a different lung of the station, all converging on the same hidden ecologies waiting in the ducts.
Under corporate cover
In the Vaishnavi Research Ring, Kavitesh frames his ambition in the driest language he can manage.
The revision request is three pages of antiseptic prose: expanded “environmental baseline sampling” to support long‑term life‑support risk assessments, harmonization of xenobiological reference panels, supplemental controls for prior hull‑microfracture incidents. He sprinkles in citations from corporate safety circulars, graphs of historical corrosion rates, a projected cost‑savings curve. Anyone skimming it will see a risk‑averse specialist volunteering to catch problems before they metastasize into lawsuits.
Approval comes back faster than he expects, a terse digital stamp and an automated reminder about “strict adherence to biocontainment chain‑of‑custody.” No one calls to ask why a microbial ecologist suddenly cares so much about duct lint.
The mandate buys him exactly what he wanted: rotating access to intake valves, hull‑adjacent sampling ports, and archived culture trays from sectors the station has half‑forgotten. He syncs his new schedule with Dev’s encrypted coordinate drops: numbers embedded in innocuous maintenance reports, a pattern only visible if you know which columns to subtract.
Night‑cycle in Vaishnavi is never truly dark, only dialed down to a cooler spectrum. When lab techs see him at odd hours, AR visor down and his prosthetic forearm humming softly as it pulls microliter draws from condensate traps, he is an unremarkable sight: the dutiful scientist who trusts data more than sleep. He nods, offers a thin smile, mutters something about “noise in the controls” as he swaps sterile vials.
Only inside his private models does the façade drop. Each “baseline” sample, logged under innocuous sector codes, is automatically cross‑indexed against Dev’s anomaly map, overlaid on station schematics. Red‑shifted heat pockets in worker ducts line up with faintly iridescent films in old filter housings from Raghukul. A hull‑adjacent port near Sharanam yields a translucent smear that refuses to behave like passive biofilm, its fluorescence curve pulsing in sync with pressure fluctuations.
He watches the composite map coalesce on his console: the station’s thin metal skin threaded with quiet, growing ecologies. Not random contamination, his gut insists. Pattern.
In the reflection on the screen, he catches the gold inlays along his arm and the blurred arc of Earth beyond the observation slit. For a moment, the mantras embossed on his prosthetic and the corporate logo on his ID badge seem to watch each other warily, like rival deities forced to share a shrine.
Tagging the veins of the station
Dev treats each work order like a costume change. In the open stretches of laborer deck, he is all banter and exaggerated sighs, a familiar silhouette hunched over access panels. “Air’s tasting like old socks again, yaar,” he jokes, waving a handheld monitor so the nearby crew laughs and rolls their eyes. He taps notes into the official tablet with theatrical care, making sure any watching supervisor sees only an overconscientious junior tech ticking boxes.
The moment a hatch closes behind him and the corridor narrows to a ribbed crawlway, his shoulders straighten. He flips his own, unauthorized interface out from under a sticker‑plastered cover, its cracked screen blooming with hidden menus. Repurposed sensor tabs (cut from scrap circuit boards) slide into shadowed bends of ductwork. Hacked thermistors disappear behind mesh screens, their housings camouflaged under a smear of ordinary dust. Biofilm swab pods click into place beneath filter frames, timer‑fused to liquefy and wick away the first hint of something new.
On the way back he always “forgets” a straight route. Each detour is another chance to lean against the metal, casually syncing the first trickle of data into his hand‑terminal. Beneath the maintenance app’s bland icons, a buried routine stitches coordinates and readouts onto an illicit copy of the station’s 3‑D schematics.
Little colored nodes blink into being along the ducts and coolant runs, brightening like nerve endings around an unseen lesion. In corporate logs, it is just another variance check closed on time. In Dev’s private overlay, the station is beginning to show its hidden circulation: veins of warmth and breath no one else has bothered to name.
Educational excursions with hidden agendas
Savitriya folds her contribution into a lesson plan.
The new “orbital ecology practicum” appears on her mixed cohort’s feeds as just another module: observing how human habit reshapes closed systems. For the colonist apprentices from Raghukul, the assignment is to catalogue “local environmental signatures” in cargo bays and docking arms: fuel tang in the air, rainbow sheens on condensation, faint halos around viewport frames when the lights dim. For Sharanam teens, the brief sends them through water taps, communal kitchens, and the half‑lit connectors they already traverse between meals and shifts.
She arms them with stripped‑down AR overlays that re‑skin their familiar routes as labeled schematics: airflow arrows, recycling loops, hull‑stress contours. Embedded prompts flash at odd intervals: touch that humming vent and rate its “mood,” mark any patch of metal that feels warmer or smoother than its neighbors, flag any shimmer that wasn’t there last week, especially if adults have started avoiding that patch of corridor without saying why.
The uploads come back as homework: shaky holo‑clips, annotated smell‑maps, voice notes muttered in three languages. On the surface, they are reflections on “learning to notice the station.” In her private console, the same files resolve into a living, crowdsourced sensor web laced through Raghukul’s cluttered arms and Sharanam’s shadowed rings, precisely where corporate monitors grow thin.
Between cycles, the four of them trade fragments in carefully deniable ways, like devotees slipping offerings past CCTV‑ringed shrines. A packet of “anonymous student reflections” moves from Sargam to Vaishnavi as a case study in perception bias; over tea in a side alcove, Savitriya muses aloud about “how stories shape what we think we’re measuring,” then slides the file into Kavitesh’s queue with a casual flick.
Back at his console, he strips identifiers and runs the phrases (“breathing wall,” “cool wind from a closed hatch,” “rust that heals overnight”) against Dev’s microgradient maps and his own sample metadata, watching text align with colored nodes and anomalous culture IDs. When Dev notices a recurring cool spot where no coolant line should be, he logs it as a minor insulation defect, adds a dutiful note about “potential condensation risk,” then pings coordinates to Kavitesh under the guise of requesting lab validation for “suspected sensor drift.”
In quieter corners of Sharanam’s intake office and at the edge of Raghukul’s customs desk, Vaidisha listens more closely during refugee debriefs and dockside incident interviews, letting silences hang just long enough that people fill them with nervous jokes about “singing pipes,” “sticky light,” “metal that hums like a tanpura.” She tags the phrases as environmental nuisance chatter, but in a private layer she matches them against sectors Dev has “serviced” and corridors where Savitriya’s students have filed strangely similar homework.
Converging maps, diverging motives
As the cycles pass, the picture sharpens. Dev’s ghostly thermal topography starts to bulge in the same sectors where Savitriya’s students report self‑mending grime and soft, vibrating bulkheads, little “rashes” of heat and cold threading along support ribs and coolant spines. Kavitesh overlays these with his own isolated culture anomalies: colonies that refuse to behave like contaminants, clustering instead in patterns that mimic airflow diagrams rather than random spread, blooming in eddies and pressure shadows as if “choosing” junctions. When he shares a sanitized summary with Vaidisha under the pretext of “ensuring security is apprised of potential systemic faults,” her incident map locks into place: the same zones show up as brief, erased biohazard flags and mysteriously rerouted patrol paths. None of them says it outright yet, but they all see the same thing: something is growing along the seams of the station, tracing its own circulation, and the paths they are outlining through duties and data are beginning to sketch not just its shape, but its preferred routes.
She starts broad, feeding the query engine months of low-level anomalies: every air-quality blip, every briefly quarantined hatch, every “resolved” contamination report that passed through her shift and a dozen others. She drags in the ugly, boring tail of station life (dust alerts near laundry vents, faint ammonia spikes in overused washrooms, the odd fungal warning around neglected food stalls) knowing that whoever cleaned the record will have hidden their work among all this static.
Then she narrows. She instructs the engine to stop trusting summaries and to treat every event as a series of raw edges: alert raised, alert acknowledged, alert cleared. Around each of those edges, she layers additional strata: camera downtime windows, door override logs, maintenance ticket closures, patrol reroutes. She constrains it further: only sequences where three or more of these edges happen within the same ten‑minute span, then are followed by nothing. No follow‑up inspection. No technician chat. No angry complaint filed by some supervisor whose workflow just got interrupted.
What first looked like random sensor noise begins to fold into repeating constellations. In heat‑map view, the station’s history becomes a scatter of these flares, clustered like infection sites along the edges of Sharanam, Raghukul, and a ragged collar of external trusses. They are not evenly distributed. They avoid the corporate heart. They nibble at the margins.
She flips perspective, asking the engine to ignore biology entirely and instead rank by “administrative anomaly density”: how often logs truncate early, how often “root cause” fields stay blank, how often the same higher‑clearance badge ID appears within a minute of an alert being born and again at the moment it dies. The same handful of IDs recur, hovering around the flares like silent signatures.
Vaidisha sits back, flexing her prosthetic knee against the console rail, watching the overlays blink and merge. The system tells her one thing. The data tells her another. Somewhere between them, a hand has been at work.
Following those clusters, she drills into specific incidents, letting the interface peel back into raw log strata. On one shift, a Sharanam access corridor flares with a sudden spike in particulate count, enough to trigger orange-tier protocols. Within ninety seconds, three adjacent cameras report “firmware reset,” their feeds blinking to black for just long enough that no continuous video exists. A junior officer, one of hers, dutifully files a biohazard note with the right codes, the right boilerplate about temporary cordon and PPE requirements. Within an hour, that entire chain has vanished from the primary dashboard, replaced by a bland line item about “false positive, no action required.”
On another shift, a Raghukul-adjacent cargo tube registers corrosive-residue flags and kicks into automated lockdown. The doors seal, hazard strobes cycle up, environmental controls spool towards purge mode… and then the lockdown clears on its own, without any accompanying decon team dispatch, no suit checkouts, no scrubber cartridges logged. The raw, time-stamped sensor and actuator data persists in buried tables; the official incident summaries, the view any supervisor sees, insist nothing ever happened.
To be sure, she seeds the system more than once. The first dummy contamination alert goes into a forgotten laborer stairwell, tagged with a mundane cause. Then she escalates: a second dummy alert near a politically sensitive junction, this time flagged as possible xenobiological residue. The first steps are identical… until they aren’t. In the same compromised sectors as her ghost flares, the chain she is tracing snaps at a predictable point, as if bitten through. Some invisible secondary process wakes, strips out the xenobio tags, quietly downgrades threat levels, and diverts the event into a shadow archive path that is never mentioned in any security training. On her console, the alert appears to have resolved itself, like a wound knitting without scar tissue. Underneath, something else has written over her work and quietly filed away the original injury.
When she reaches for that side archive, the interface behaves like hostile terrain. Queries dead-end in “insufficient clearance” stubs with no originating officer, no escalation chain. Audit trails that should ladder cleanly through authorizations sheer off mid‑entry, replaced by opaque daemon tags and salted, unresolvable hashes. It isn’t ordinary redaction; it feels algorithmic, structural, as if policy itself has been rewritten to forget.
She exports what she can into a personal, air-gapped slate, sketching crude overlays by hand while the official interface glares blandly back at her. The hot spots that emerge sit like bruises on the station’s schematics: shadowed truss joints behind Sharanam, cargo spines threading into Raghukul, a scatter of half-forgotten maintenance rings where protocols go blind. To a casual review, these sectors look clean, even over-compliant. To Vaidisha, they read as something worse than contaminated: they are places the system has been taught not to see, a deliberate scotoma etched into policy itself.
She tweaks the phrasing three times before sending the practicum brief out on the hub’s shared feed. In its final form it reads like homework, not reconnaissance.
Students are to log “sensory anomalies” on their comm-slates (odd smells, textures, sounds, flickers in peripheral vision) tagged with time, location, and what work or errand they were in the middle of. No heroics, she underlines. If something makes you want to back away, back away. The assignment is about attention, not bravery.
She couches it in the language of craft. Good observation is like good music, she tells them: pattern, rhythm, restraint. On the projection wall behind her, case studies drift past in gentle AR overlays: archival footage of a filamentous fungus blooming along an old coolant baffle, time‑lapse images of ice‑crystal lattices forming fractal spirals in a microgravity condenser. The labels are neutral, cleaned of the panic and quarantines that accompanied the originals. Here, they are simply “Examples of Structured Noticing in Orbital Environments.”
“Describe what you sense,” she says. “Not what you think it means. ‘Sweet-metallic smell, like burnt jaggery, strongest near vent’ is useful. ‘Alien slime, definitely dangerous’ is not.” A ripple of laughter loosens the room.
She walks them through how to anchor their logs: using station clock rather than local shift slang, pinning locations to bulkhead codes and deck numbers instead of “near Rafi’s stall” or “that scary junction.” It is framed as training for any future in engineering, ecology, or even security: skills corporate recruiters claim to value. That framing matters. Parents and supervisors scanning the brief will see “field skills” and “documentation practice,” not a map of places the station is starting to go strange.
On the syllabus it’s just another module in “Field Notes in Orbital Ecology.” To the handful of older students who catch her eye when she mentions “unreported phenomena,” she adds a small, deliberate pause. “Sometimes,” she says, “systems miss things. People notice first.”
Outside class, her network starts to move like a slow, deliberate current through the station. Former students in Raghukul and Sharanam whisper the practicum link across canteen tables and bunk rows, telling friends, “Didi won’t put your name in any report,” reminding them of times she’d written character references, mediated with a foreman, found a way around a punitive transfer. The assignment looks harmless enough on the public feed, no mention of xenobiology, just “environmental literacy”, but the endorsements give it weight.
She staggers her debrief circles so they sit right on the seam-lines of daily life: one just as cargo shifts turn over, so dockhands float in still smelling of cold vacuum and lubricant; another after the evening water queues in Sharanam, when children’s tempers are raw and adults’ patience is thin. No uniforms, no corporate logos: only the hub’s soft, scuffed padding and a battered thermos of chai.
Each session begins the same way. “Hands to the hull,” she says, and the room stills. Eyes close. Palms and soles press to bulkhead and floor, feeling for the faint, granular thrum of pumps, the high shimmer of data-lines, the almost-breath of air recyclers.
“Notice what is always there,” she murmurs. “Then notice what changes.”
They sit like that for thirty seconds, a minute, dockhands, refugee aunties, corporate interns on their “civic credits,” kids who can’t yet reach both wall and floor at once. Even the fidgety ones fall quiet as they discover the station’s layered pulse under their skin.
Only then does she invite speech. One by one, they describe not just what they saw, but how the world around it felt: gravity pulling slightly wrong, a draft that shouldn’t exist, a silence where there should have been hum. Savitriya rarely corrects; she nudges. “Where was your hand when you noticed?” “Did the vibration change before or after the smell?” The circle becomes a kind of collective sensor, tuned less by instruments than by shared, disciplined attention.
The first wave of reports is scattered and anecdotal: “rainbow scum” on a galley wall one day, a metallic aftertaste in recirculated air another, hair lifting in a place where the static should be bled off. Savitriya resists the urge to steer; instead she slows them down, asks each storyteller to anchor their memory: what song was playing in the corridor, which festival banner hung nearby, whether the gravity felt true or a shade light. Was someone arguing? Were pumps running high? She tags these details on her slate, color-coding smells, sounds, and tactile shifts, then, after class, overlays them on a simplified station schematic. The resulting pattern is still fuzzy, but its contours already echo the bruised sectors on Vaidisha’s hand-drawn maps, like a half-remembered melody returning.
Over successive sessions, she quietly tightens the focus. When several accounts cluster around the same maintenance ring or truss line, she designs a “field exercise” that sends mixed groups there on pretexts: measuring echo times in unused corridors, timing airflow recovery after hatch cycles, sketching corrosion patterns on exposed ribs, noting which vents exhale warmth instead of chill. Back in the hub, she has them compare notes in small breakout circles, re‑telling each observation twice, once plainly, once with every assumption stripped out, listening less for spectacular anomalies and more for recurring absences: doors that are never locked but never patrolled, alarms that everyone has learned to ignore, inspection tags so old their ink has bled into the metal.
By the end of the first practicum cycle, her mosaic of notes reads less like a lab log and more like a caste-map of maintenance. Different voices, same coordinates: shadowed cross‑braces skirting Sharanam’s water tanks, cargo spines feeding into Raghukul’s oldest berths, auxiliary ducts skimming worker dorms: routes everyone uses to save time, where uniforms rarely appear except after a fight or a fire. When she strips away names and shift-codes and leaves only coordinates, timestamps, and sensory fragments, the ghost‑map that remains settles almost perfectly over Dev’s thermal smudges and Vaidisha’s quietly deleted hazard flags, outlining not just where the station’s skin is thin, but where its gaze has been taught to slide away.
In one small-circle debrief, Savitriya floats cross‑legged near the module’s center, one foot hooked under a handhold so her body doesn’t rotate, the holo‑pad anchored between them like a small blue pond. She coaxes for specifics instead of rumors, her voice low enough that the murmur from the other circles becomes a kind of privacy.
“Show me,” she says, passing the stylus to the Sharanam teenager. “Not just where it was, but where you were.”
The girl’s fingers hover, then begin to sketch the shower block from memory: the three stalls facing the greyed‑out mirror, the cracked drainage grate, the hand‑painted rangoli someone once etched above the towel hooks. Savitriya prompts gently.
“Here,” the girl says at last, circling the farthest stall. “The fog started in this corner. At first it was just… shimmer. Like air above a tawa. Then thicker. Not steam, but… dots.” She sprinkles glittering markers across the diagram, indicating where the haze coalesced along the ceiling seam, where droplets formed a faint curtain.
“How long did the tingling last?” Savitriya asks. “From first breath to clear air.”
The girl closes her eyes, counting silently, lips moving. “Maybe… two bhajans on the speaker? It prickled when the spray hit, like when you pull off a sweater and the hairs stand up. Only it didn’t hurt. It felt…” She glances around, embarrassed. “…nice. Safe. Like something noticing you and being careful.”
“Did it move with the water, or stay with you?” Savitriya leans in. “Did the sensation travel down the drain, or cling when you stepped out?”
“It followed me,” the girl whispers. “When I turned, it turned. The fog was thicker where my hand had just been.” On the holo, her stylus draws faint strands trailing a stick‑figure body. “And when I shut off the water, it thinned fast, but the tingling stayed on my skin. Like it didn’t want to go back into the pipes.”
She hesitates before adding, “I’ve avoided that stall since. I thought maybe I’d imagined it, until last week another family was reassigned to our block. Their little boy came running out, laughing, saying the shower felt like ‘static that likes you.’ That same night, maintenance locked the whole row. Next morning, the locks were open again, but the meter displays were different. My mother asked security about it, but they only said, ‘Water meters recalibrated. Nothing to worry.’ No work order on the notice board, no outage logged. Just… changed.”
Across the circle, Dev’s eyes flicker at the phrasing. “Recalibrated,” he repeats under his breath, already matching the girl’s rough sketch to a half‑remembered service map in his head.
At the next session, the Raghukul loader arrives late, still in grease‑streaked overalls and mismatched mag‑boots, trying to lurk at the edge of the circle. Under Savitriya’s patient nudging he finally takes the stylus and drags a rough rectangle.
“Cargo spine C‑nine,” he mutters. “Old side. Between berths twenty‑three and ‑five.”
He sketches the long corridor, hatch markers, a cluster of stacked crates where he usually sneaks a smoke. When she asks about the sound, he grimaces, then closes his eyes and lets his throat vibrate: a layered, throbbing hum that shifts in and out of a higher note, like two bulkheads arguing under their breath.
“It’s not in the ears only,” he says, opening his eyes. “Belt tools buzz same rhythm. Even my teeth.” He taps his jaw. “When supervisor comes through, badge pings the sensor node right here, ” he marks a ceiling panel “, and the hum just… flattens. Like it’s pretending to be part of the fans.”
He adds, more quietly, “My mate tried to record it. Personal ’corder caught footsteps, doors, my cursing… but where the hum was?” He shrugs. “Dead air. Like the metal swallowed it.”
Across the circle, Dev’s hand tightens on his pad. “Telemetry shadow,” he notes softly, half to himself. “Could be active damping… or something learning which frequencies get logged.”
When it’s his turn, a laborer tech with tired eyes and scrubbed‑raw knuckles clears his throat and sketches an external brace in awkward lines, labeling the junction where he found the “self‑healing slime.” In his account the translucent sheen isn’t just sitting there; it’s creeping, a film that beads and then crawls uphill along the strut in microgravity, knitting hairline fractures into a smooth curve. Under his gloved fingertip it left a cool, gooseflesh sensation and, after a few minutes, a faint iridescent lattice that handheld scanners insisted was ordinary alloy. At Savitriya’s urging he calls up the maintenance log on his pad. The entry he remembers (shaky description, blurred stills) has been overwritten by a generic “visual inspection complete / no anomalies detected.” He admits he stopped flagging oddities after that. The system, he says bitterly, “decides what’s real, and what never happened.”
Between sessions, the loose team convenes in a quiet corner of the Sargam hub, pinning these anonymized testimonies onto their growing coordinate mesh. Kavitesh overlays the girl’s tingling fog with humidity gradients and tiny conductivity spikes Dev smuggled from Sharanam’s shower feeds; the loader’s humming corridor aligns with a narrow band of micro‑vibration signatures that never quite tripped diagnostic thresholds; the brace with the erased log sits dead‑center in a patch of external telemetry where sensor calibration files show repeated, unexplained “corrections,” as if the system kept adjusting reality to keep the curve smooth. Each human account adds a behavioral contour, tactile, auditory, emotional, that raw data had flattened into noise.
Kavitesh feels the hairs along his intact arm lift, an involuntary corroboration the instruments would call artefact. Vaidisha’s jaw works, thinking of unlogged refugee complaints. Raghuveeran’s dockhand students exchange sharp looks, silently recalculating risk. Savitriya waits, letting the weight of it settle: if the thing is watching back, and the system is lying, then any move they make will be made under observation: from both.
The directive does not arrive as a conversation but as a cascade: access badges silently downgrade, routine routes suddenly demand secondary authentication, and a top‑layer memo with soothing language about “proactive stewardship” ripples through every console. In the Vaishnavi ring, the notification blossoms on translucent walls in soft blues and greens, wrapped in mandalas and corporate logos, as if piety and policy were the same thing.
Dev is in a service spine between a coolant manifold and a half‑disassembled air recycler when his wristband buzzes. The status of his work order blinks from “approved” to “under review,” then resettles with three new subroutines he never requested. A small icon, biohazard stylized into a lotus, anchors the corner.
He scrolls through the memo once, then again more slowly. In the fine print, he sees that the exact worker decks where his piggyback sensors were most productive are now slated for “closed‑loop inspection by certified teams only,” a procedural phrase that in practice means: no unsupervised tinkering, no extra leads run through “obsolete” ports, no plausible deniability. His last three diagnostic bundles are retroactively tagged as “sensitive,” sealing off the very data streams he was starting to understand.
He calls up a map. Reddened outlines cinch tight around Raghukul‑adjacent ductwork and Sharanam’s overtaxed scrubber loops, corridors he knows better than the back of his own scarred hands. New checkpoints appear like cysts along them, each linked to rosters populated with names he recognizes from corporate training bulletins, not from shift rotations down here.
Dev tries a small test, queuing a routine filter flush with his usual quiet add‑ons: a micro‑temp probe here, an extra conductivity tap there. The system hesitates, then strips his attachments with an automated note and logs the attempt to an audit file he cannot open.
For a moment he just floats there, one boot hooked under a rung, listening to the tired wheeze of the recycler. The station has always pushed back, in little ways. This feels different: not a leak to be patched, but a hand closing over the places he had, briefly, made his own.
On the security grid, the change arrives like frost spreading over glass.
Vaidisha is midway through her usual end‑of‑cycle sweep when the map blooms with new color: the soft amber of “heightened attention” around Raghukul’s outer arms and the shadowed ribs by Sharanam hardens to a dense, unfamiliar corporate‑blue. The legend updates itself a heartbeat later, “ENHANCED BIOSECURITY CORRIDOR: CORE AUTHORIZATION ONLY”, as if the station has calmly redrawn which lives count as its interior.
She taps a sector she has walked a hundred times. Instead of camera feeds and patrol logs, a translucent pane rises: Request escalated. Please specify operational need. Beneath it, a tiny audit icon flashes, already logging her hesitation.
She runs a quiet test, trying to widen a camera’s field by a single degree, the sort of adjustment she has slipped through a thousand times to keep refugees out of unnecessary trouble. The command executes, then instantly rolls back. Notification: configuration locked by BioSec Suite. Her interface records not the image she sought, but her attempt to see it.
Where she once could blur a timestamp, delay a door‑seal by seconds, let someone slip through ahead of a sweep, every deviation now produces a soft chime and a supervisor ping to the core. Her fingertips hover over the controls of her own system and, for the first time, she feels surveilled from the other side of the glass. Her curiosity rendered as a pattern in an incident queue.
In Sargam’s free‑float classroom, the shift manifests as absences and evasions that drag at the room like excess mass. The colonist‑dock kids who had once competed to describe “singing metal” and self‑healing seams now flick in brief, glitchy on‑screen: hurried apologies about mandatory environmental drills, new rota overlaps, “temporary” work placements nearer the outer arms. Their voices are too careful, as if someone is listening on their side of the channel.
Refugee teenagers from Sharanam arrive late or drift at the hatch, checking corridor cams on borrowed slates, or they do not arrive at all. They mutter about redirected foot‑traffic, “random” badge checks, gate closures that sever the maintenance crawlways they relied on. When Savitriya asks, gently, their eyes slide away. The silence around “strange growths” has become a rule, not a confusion. Someone has told them that naming what they see might brand them as part of the problem, not its witnesses.
In the Vaishnavi ring, the memo scrolls past Kavitesh’s visor in soft gradients and weaponized calm. The phrasing is everything he has ever put into grant applications (containment, longitudinal monitoring, ethical triage of unknown ecologies) yet implementation routes past his lab into newly minted “risk‑management cadres” with no publication records, only clearance levels. Sample requisitions from the newly blue‑ringed sectors freeze mid‑queue; automated replies cite “resource reprioritization” and “operational harmonization,” corporate mantras that mean: stay out. Requests for even a brief escorted hull survey bounce to a faceless BioSec committee. He realizes, with a small, almost physical click, that the company will finally acknowledge the xenobiology, but only as an asset class, not as a field of inquiry. And never under the gaze of anyone likely to object to how it is labeled, sequestered, or quietly shipped off‑station.
When they compare what little they can still see, a sharper, colder pattern surfaces. Gates and scanners don’t just cinch around hot zones; they snap shut along the informal arteries workers, refugees, and colonists use. The same quiet flows that once fed their atlas. Dev’s badge drops from engineering rosters, Vaidisha’s patrol scripts shunt her toward showpiece corridors, and a buried directive reclassifies Sargam from “neutral learning hub” to “nonessential transit module.” Officially, the habitat is acquiring a sterile safety band. In practice, a lattice of privileged corridors is crystallizing that admits only pre‑cleared BioSec teams into the living microhabitats, cauterizing the organic channels of rumor, improvisation, and witness that first allowed the ecology to be perceived at all.
In the days leading up to the maneuver, Kavitesh begins living in the gaps between official tasks. He volunteers for late rotations in the Vaishnavi data cores under the bland pretext of “revalidating xenobiology alert thresholds post‑reclassification,” a line no supervisor wants to interrogate too closely. Seated in the cool glow of stacked holo‑panes, visor slipped low, he threads three off‑the‑books streams through the sanctioned dashboards.
Dev’s anonymized duct telemetry arrives as jittery heat maps and partial gas‑exchange traces, routed through generic engineering accounts. Vaidisha’s contribution is stranger: negative space, clusters of timestamped absence where incident reports ought to be, camera feeds that cut out precisely when biohazard flags should have triggered. From Savitriya come pattern‑coded notes summarizing her students’ accounts, “singing,” “shimmering,” “self‑healing”, translated into rough descriptors he can hang numbers on.
He overlays them one by one, fingers of his prosthetic hand ghosting through the air, reassigning weights, adjusting tolerances that he will later restore before anyone audits the logs. Sectors begin to flare with recursive insistence: outer Raghukul gantries where cargo manifests blur; coolant spines skirting laborer decks where temperature curves bow subtly against expected flow; shadow‑side recyclers feeding Sharanam where trace gases rise and fall with a rhythm no maintenance schedule explains.
On one screen, the corporate map shows only risk classifications and access tiers, a topography of control. On another, his composite glows like a nervous system: filaments branching, thickening at stress points, dimming where new barriers have starved it of traffic. The more layers he adds, historical filter fouling, unexplained corrosion, anomalous noise in vibration sensors, the less it resembles scattered contamination and the more it coheres into something unified, distributed, and responsive.
He runs a speculative model, treating the hotspots as nodes in a single organism testing the station’s seams. Feedback loops stabilize, not explode. The “contaminant” appears to be routing around corporate cauterization, seeking redundancy, not collapse.
His pulse ticks louder in his ears. If he is right, the ecology is not merely surviving in neglected corners; it is learning the shape of Prithvi‑Parikrama’s politics, flowing along the same unofficial veins his people use. And BioSec, by sealing off formal access, may have just taught it where the real arteries lie.
Dev works from the opposite end of the system, quietly sanding down his own outline until he looks like background process. The morning the clampdown memo hits engineering, his name vanishes from two visible rota lists and reappears, downgraded, on low‑priority vent audits that no one with ambition volunteers for. Badge codes for the more sensitive circuits he needs ride under a friend’s profile. An older fitter with pension years to guard and no interest in asking why Dev insists on doing the boring runs himself.
On those runs he moves with the practised slouch of a man who fixes things, not one who watches. In junction boxes and sensor nests, his gloved fingers slide in “calibration patches”: slivers of code disguised as routine firmware updates, checksum‑clean, comment fields full of corporate boilerplate. At the moment of load‑shedding, those patches will quietly fork raw telemetry into shadow buffers stitched along maintenance subnetworks and forgotten logging shares.
Where official diagnostics will record smeared, low‑bandwidth averages, his caches will hold every spike and flutter. Humidity inhalations, trace‑gas exhalations, micro‑temperature sighs of whatever is learning to breathe in the ducts and coolant lines.
In security, Vaidisha endures the mandatory briefings about the upcoming maneuver, posture textbook‑upright while supervisors chant through slides on “strict perimeter adherence” and “no discretionary rerouting.” Questions are invited, not welcomed. She offers none. When the room empties in a rustle of armor plates and muttered complaints, she stays behind under pretext of “reviewing sector reassignment” and pulls up the patrol matrix on her console.
On the standard overlay, the grid looks airtight: overlapping loops, doubled posts, bright icons of BioSec teams seeded along the shadow‑side trusses. Then she drops in the parameters Dev hid in a routine maintenance ping (timestamp offsets, power‑throttling windows) and the pattern buckles. Whole stretches of corridor drop to still‑frame sampling; biometric readers slide into passive listen‑only modes.
She does not tag them in any official log. Instead, her visor blooms a second layer: hairline filaments of opportunity snaking through the mesh, keyed to her own internal clock and Dev’s projected loads. Walking those paths in her mind, she can feel where patrols will be slowed by “randomized” badge checks, where cameras will lag three, four seconds between frames.
To her supervisors, the schedule is a tightened net. In her private view, thin seams of engineered darkness thread between the nodes, just wide enough for someone who knows how to move.
Out at Sargam, Savitriya turns a scheduled lesson on “Load Management and Orbital Ecology” into a listening post and quiet rehearsal for risk. She has students sketch “low‑traffic zones” on shared holos, framing it as an exercise in habitat resilience. Raghukul apprentices complain inspectors have postponed noncritical cargo checks until “after the power games”; Sharanam teens report whispered orders to keep families sealed inside modules, ostensibly for safety but delivered with nervous eyes. Patiently, she nudges them toward naming “areas to avoid,” then zooms the map out, letting their annotations coalesce. With a teacher’s calm and a strategist’s focus, she notes how the places they expect to be deserted (an auxiliary service corridor by Raghukul’s outer arms, a half‑lit reclamation access ring on Sharanam’s night side) drop like pins onto the same microhabitat clusters Kavitesh has been tracing in his off‑the‑books overlays.
On the colonist side, Raghuveeran parses a very different set of omens. Dock gossip tells him customs will be running skeleton crews during the maneuver, focused on stabilizing power to the corporate core; a half‑drunk engineer lets slip that camera refresh rates along the shadow trusses will drop to “nearly useless.” Manoj brings in flight‑lane forecasts showing a brief lull in scheduled traffic past Raghukul’s outer nodes and a narrow window when tugs will be tied up nudging ballast instead of policing approach vectors. Cross‑checking with his own greasy‑thumb schematics, Raghuveeran sees a clean gap between patrol arcs and automated pings. For a handful of orbits, the routes he usually threads by bribe and bravado will open into wide, dim corridors no one is watching closely. He revises his run plan accordingly, plotting an approach that kisses blind sensor cones, skims the same shadow‑side structures near Sharanam, and times his docking burn to the second shift‑change yawn. Precisely where, unbeknownst to him, those microhabitats now gleam at the heart of Kavitesh’s converging maps.
He doesn’t open with tactics but with a frame.
“This is not a heist,” he says, letting the word hang long enough for a few faces to tighten, “and it’s not a rescue. We are not heroes pulling something from a burning building.”
His right hand makes a small turning motion; the station schematic floating between them shivers, palettes inverting. The red hazard bands around three sectors fade to a dusk‑blue, and within them, the growth sites bloom into soft, pulsing golds and greens. Instead of warning glyphs, fine traceries appear re-rendered as veins and nodes.
“This,” Kavitesh continues, “is a consultation with something already living here.”
The phrasing feels risky even as he says it, but he doesn’t walk it back. His left arm flexes on reflex, servos whispering as he zooms in on one node. The bioluminescent shimmer paints his prosthetic’s gold inlays, mantras along the inner forearm blinking in and out of the holo wash.
“We go in as physicians, not butchers.”
He doesn’t raise his voice; he just starts listing rules, each one anchored to a flick of light on the schematic.
“Ultra‑low‑volume micro‑samples only where we can prove duplication. You see a lattice repeating (here, here, and here”) he flags three identical patterns spanning Raghukul, the coolant artery, Sharanam. “No cutting through contiguous mats. If we have to cross, we cross existing fractures, not make new ones. Think of it like nerve tissue, not mould on a wall.”
He glances at Dev. “No off‑the‑shelf sterilants. No foam, no silver‑ion slush, no ‘routine’ purges. If a human life is directly at risk, we make that call together, on‑site, not because a protocol template says so.”
Vaidisha’s brows tick up at that, but she doesn’t interrupt. Her arms remain folded, armor plates creaking softly as she shifts against the wall.
“The language in my report will be clinical,” he says, almost to her. “Biofilm, colony, interface structures. But the way we act in the field, ” he taps his chest with his natural hand, the beads at his wrist clicking, “has to be reverent. Assume complexity. Assume relationship.”
The room quiets. The hum of Sargam’s air circulators, the distant clink of a late student clipping onto a handhold in the adjoining module, all fall to the edges.
Dev is the first to look away from the holo, squinting at him instead. “You’re saying we… grant it patient rights?” There’s a half‑mocking edge to his tone, but also something hungry.
“I’m saying,” Kavitesh replies, “we behave as if, in a few months, we might discover it qualifies. And we do not do anything now that we would regret if we had to look it in the eye later.”
A faint smile touches Savitriya’s lips; she folds one knee under her in the air, anchoring herself by a wrist strap, gaze intent. “You’re also saying,” she murmurs, “we don’t let corporate frame this as ‘decontamination’ before we’ve even listened.”
He nods once. “Exactly. Every action we take on these runs has to be defensible in three directions: scientifically, ethically, and legally. If they demand raw samples, I can give them micro‑volumes and high‑resolution in‑situ data that are more valuable than ripped‑out chunks. If they push for scorched‑earth, we show them a mapped, interconnected system. An ecosystem, not a spill.”
His fingers dance through menu icons: thresholds, risk flags, contingencies. “You’ll see red lines here: places where one wrong move gives them excuse for full quarantine. We avoid those, even if it costs us data.”
There is a small, almost involuntary exhale from someone in the cluster of students at the back. One of Savitriya’s older refugee apprentices, eyes wide, hand tightening on a rope line. Fear, but also relief that someone is naming a limit.
“For tonight,” he finishes, drawing the holo back out to its triad of glowing zones, “hold this frame. Not a raid. Not a crusade. A first conversation. We go in prepared to be surprised: and to stop the moment we realise we don’t understand what our touch will do.”
Only when he sees the idea settle (behind Dev’s tired defiance, behind Vaidisha’s skepticism, in the quiet steadiness of Savitriya’s gaze) does he let the schematic rotate, ready to narrow to their first target.
He pinches the Raghukul segment open until the external truss blooms above them, a lattice of struts and junctions turning slowly like the ribs of some unfinished mandir. Manoj’s approach vectors sketch faint arcs around it, overlapping with dots from hull‑scan anomalies and Dev’s stolen maintenance telemetry. Where corporate inspectors saw “micro‑pitting” and “sensor interference,” his overlay re-renders them as clustered nodes, filaments running between like faint sutures.
“This,” he says, highlighting a narrow run of spars, “is where we go first.”
A ghost‑outline of their path appears: a dog‑leg through cargo corridors, then out via an almost‑forgotten service lock that Manoj’s crew uses for quick patch jobs. The timing tag flashes over it: exactly eleven minutes of reduced surveillance during the power‑balancing maneuver, when external cams switch to buffered mode and suit signatures get lost in the background noise of field realignment.
“We stay tethered to the truss, not the hull,” he continues. “Maximum three bodies outside: myself, Manoj if we need positioning, one spotter at the hatch. No one taps the primary skin; no casual kicks off the panels.”
He expands a cross‑section of the growth: fine tendrils hugging a stress‑fracture, faint bioluminescence modeled from Manoj’s distorted sensor pings. Over it, he sketches his toolset: the prosthetic’s contact pad unfolding, microlens array cycling, a hair‑thin probe tasting trace gases at the crack’s edge.
“I make the touch,” he says. “Surface spectrography, filament imaging, local chemical profile. One pass. No scraping, no chipping, no peel‑tests. We don’t pry it off its anchor points; we don’t introduce mechanical shock that’ll travel down the beam and make the whole mat spasm.”
Dev’s hand goes up, half‑automatic. “What if it’s interfering with structural monitors? They’ll want the obstruction removed.”
“Then we give them something better than removal,” Kavitesh replies. “We map exactly how it’s damping micro‑vibrations, where it’s thick, where it’s thin. We show them it’s acting like a shock absorber, not corrosion. You can negotiate with engineering if you bring them data that improves their safety margins.”
He glances to Vaidisha. “Your part is making sure no one asks why three people are strolling out along the truss in the middle of a maneuver.”
She snorts softly. “They won’t be strolling. They’ll be logged as a scheduled joint inspection with Station Structural. Routine check on power‑routing clamps before festival traffic spikes.” Her eyes flick across the overlay. “You’ll have eight minutes of plausible presence. After that, someone in Control gets bored and starts zooming cams.”
“Then eight minutes is what we take.” He collapses the truss back to a manageable outline, leaving only three golden points where he intends to contact. “In, observe, disengage. We don’t chase anomalies; we don’t go sightseeing along the beam. We touch it once, cleanly, and when we leave, whatever is living there should be less exposed, not more.”
The schematic irises down to the coolant manifold threading the laborer decks, its arteries pulsing a fatigued, chemical blue. With a gesture, Kavitesh braids in Dev’s contamination plots and a rough overlay of worker‑complaint heatmaps: clusters of unexplained coughs, metallic tastes, stubborn filter clogs, all riding the same paths as his xenobiology flags.
“Here the rules change,” he says. He highlights narrow tolerance bands around flow rate and pressure. “If we drop outside this envelope, the cascade failsafes trigger an auto‑flush. That’s a mass sterilisation event: of them, and of whatever they’re hosting.”
He sketches their approach: insulated sensor sleeves slid into idle test ports, non‑reactive micro‑cameras piggybacking on existing inspection nozzles, microelectrode pairs sampling pH and redox shifts without shedding ions.
“We listen to its chemical conversation in place,” he adds, zooming to a branching junction. “If this is a circulatory organ for the station, we don’t induce a stroke just to take its pulse. We ghost through: no valve cycling, no ‘temporary’ bypasses. Dev shadows telemetry in real time; the moment we see strain on downstream lungs or pumps, we back out and leave it more stable than we found it.”
He pulls up Sharanam’s reclamation loop last: tight coils of pipe and tank overlaid with faint glows where residents reported “shimmer” in vents and a sweet‑metallic tang in taps. His voice hardens. Any misstep here gives Corporate pretext for the harshest quarantines: and the first bulkheads to slam will be around refugees. So the protocol goes almost monastic: sampling only from already‑clogged meshes, spectral reads on stray condensate beads, no valve cycling, no pressure tests, no flow interruptions. As he talks, Savitriya tags nearby kitchens, wash‑stalls, prayer rooms, quietly building a list of elders and coordinators she must brief so access comes as hospitality, not under the shadow of an armed escort.
To close, he syncs the three sites into a tight, shared countdown, highlighting the slim overlap in which every move must land between sweeps and power‑balancing spikes. He lays out comms discipline: low‑band, line‑of‑sight relays only, no corporate routing, pre‑agreed abort codes if any node wobbles. Then the line they will not cross: if preserving the ecosystem and protecting residents diverge, they choose people, record everything, and fight policy later. The weight of that vow settles over them; no one objects. In their different silences (Dev’s jaw knotting, Vaidisha’s eyes narrowing as she runs worst‑case trees, Savitriya’s breath lengthening into practiced calm) they recognise the plan as moral trial as much as technical op.
He doesn’t just name roles; he walks each of them through their insertion points, pinching and rotating the holo until each view feels like a cockpit they could sit inside. Dev’s console perspective blooms first: a stacked lattice of coolant manifolds, air‑quality nodes, and truss interfaces, all overlaid with layers of blinking maintenance tags in corporate pastel.
“Start from what the system already believes,” Kavitesh says. “We don’t invent ghosts, we ride the ones it’s half‑expecting.”
Dev leans in, eyes flicking as he filters by subsystem, then by supervisor. Together they scroll through the next three duty cycles, looking for lulls where a blip won’t draw a bored tech’s eye. They flag half‑hour gaps between shift handovers, the dead space when calibration drones are docked but not yet redeployed, the moments when station power is being rebalanced and baseline noise is high.
“There,” Dev mutters, highlighting a coolant‑flow check already scheduled near the laborer decks. “If I fold an air‑quality ‘recalibration’ into this cluster, no one will see the pattern. They’ll think it’s some efficiency push from upstairs.”
They begin stitching his “calibration cycles” into existing work orders, never touching more than one chain per department, ensuring no single supervisor sees the entire weave. When a gap yawns too clean, Dev deliberately dirties it. Adding a minor, plausible fault code somewhere far from their route so attention bleeds away.
On the holo, he marks each insertion with sharp, color‑coded glyphs: green where he can ghost through on silent spoofing, piggybacking on routine diagnostics; amber where he may have to lean on noisier faults, temporarily raising a warning that he’ll catch and smother inside his sandbox buffer.
“Red?” Kavitesh asks.
Dev hesitates, then shakes his head. “No reds. If it needs a red, we don’t go.”
Satisfied, he pushes the compiled schedule to his personal slate. The device chirps softly as it syncs with his back‑door scripts. He gives a single, curt nod. Not bravado, but the tight acknowledgement of someone who has just committed to juggling several live blades at once.
Next he layers security authorizations over Dev’s scaffolding, locking the weave into place. With a flick, Vaidisha calls up stacked panes of patrol telemetry, badge‑activity heatmaps, and incident logs, their paths threading through the holo like restless constellations. Her gaze tracks the thin arcs where she can safely bend reality without snapping it.
“Your ghosts first,” she murmurs, filtering to Dev’s green and amber windows. She drafts micro‑reassignments in those slots. Tight thirty‑minute bands that reclassify their IDs as environmental auditors tied to minor air‑quality alerts, not lab staff slipping out of bounds or dockers wandering off task. Each change is routed through obscure administrative subroutines: legacy audit queues, half‑deprecated safety initiatives no one volunteers to oversee.
At junctions where patrol paths intersect their routes, she doesn’t erase patrols; she scuffs them. A routine lift‑inspection moved three bulkheads over, a scheduled debrief stretched by eight minutes, a training sim reslotted one cycle earlier. Tiny delays and detours accumulate into moving blind pockets, gaps that look like ordinary friction rather than design. She tags every adjustment with innocuous justifications, the kind of bureaucratic noise any later auditor will skim past with a sigh, not a red circle.
Social coverage comes third, wrapped over infrastructure and security like insulation over live wire. Savitriya pinches and drags to highlight common rooms, corridor choke‑points, shrines, and market nooks at Raghukul and Sharanam, layering resident heatmaps over them. She maps her “lessons” to those spaces and times, planning short, rotating circles rather than a single big gathering. Five‑, ten‑minute modules that give her plausible reasons to be present wherever someone might notice a flicker in lights or a soft hiss of pressure equalisation.
For each node she drafts a slightly different story and tone: at the docks, brisk talk of “efficiency upgrades” and bonus‑tier safety scores; in the annex, slower language about shared stewardship, the difference between monitoring and blaming, and how rumours can trigger panicked lockdowns. She codes in breathing pauses and question breaks, little buffers where she can adapt on the fly if alarms stray off script.
Only then does he call up Manoj’s arena: the black geometry outside the hull. The holo peels back to show approach vectors and sensor cones around Raghukul, with corporate arrays rendered as faint, rotating lattices. Manoj tags a sliver of space just off a cargo arm where station radar overlaps are weakest, promising he can hold there on minimal burn and no active pings, life‑support throttled to miserly trickle. They agree on visual cues that will tell him when to edge closer, and on the exact minute his abort clock starts if he hears nothing at all, even if it means leaving them behind.
Finally he lays his own layer over the crowded map, giving the whole weave a spine. Tool‑icons bloom at each target: micro‑samplers, phased‑array scanners, microgravity swabs, each tethered by fine lines to Dev’s downtimes and Vaidisha’s audit masks. For every node he programs a primary traverse and a single fallback arc, with hard caps on exposure time before drift or latency betrays them. He makes them rehearse the constraint aloud until it sits in their muscles. His last note is quiet but stubborn: all this forgery is just cushioning for a touch so light that both organisms and neighbours can later swear nothing changed at all.
They start with systems failure, because metal and code are more predictable than people. On Kavitesh’s wall display, a coolant‑loop sensor icon flashes red in the holo schematic and refuses to spoof on Dev’s first command; the Vaishnavi Ring’s monitoring AI flags the discrepancy with a sharp chime.
“Good,” Dev mutters, fingers flexing over his pad. “Let it be stubborn. Watch.”
He freezes the sim, then peels open the alert’s metadata with a practiced flick. A column of clean, regular telemetry scrolls above the flashing icon: too clean, too regular, the kind that would make a conscientious tech look twice if it suddenly went silent. Instead of forcing a perfect lie, he taps a control ribbon and narrates under his breath as if teaching himself.
“First rule: real systems are never this tidy. So we make it tired.”
He drags a jitter slider until the feed begins to hiccup: minor timing offsets, temperature micro‑oscillations, intermittent checksum errors. Then he layers on uglier noise: brief plateaus where the signal flatlines, sudden saw‑tooth surges that correct themselves a second later. The graph turns into a mess of jitter and sag, an ugly pattern that screams aging hardware, not intent.
On another pane he pulls up the station’s fault‑classification heuristics and tunes the noise against them, dialling values until the AI’s confidence rating slides out of “possible tamper” and settles into “progressive sensor drift.”
“You see the tag?” he says, pointing. “Now it thinks a junior tech over‑crimped the cable three years ago and nobody logged it. That’s the kind of sin the system understands.”
He records a macro for the whole maneuver, binding the sequence to a single keystroke, then chains three of these macros into a preset: one for hull microfracture monitors near Raghukul, one for the coolant manifold on the labor decks, one for the water‑quality node at Sharanam. A test run floods the simulated oversight console with bored auto‑tickets: ROUTINE MAINT REQ / LOW PRIORITY / ETA: NEXT SCHEDULED WINDOW.
On the periphery of the holo, a cartoon tech avatar blinks and shrugs as the backlog counter ticks up by one.
“That,” Dev says, sitting back, “is what we hide inside. Not a hole. Just another headache nobody wants to fix.”
Next they stress‑test human interference. On Kavitesh’s wall, the patrol sim replays in tight loops: a pair of blue‑tag security icons drifting past their intended window, then, on a randomized iteration, one route kinking sharply and doubling back along the projected path to the coolant manifold.
“This is where I step in,” Vaidisha says, voice clipped but steady. She drops her auth layer over the route: her name, badge code, and unit assignment graft themselves onto the patrol’s schedule. With a few rapid keystrokes she scripts a bogus inspection order into the queue. Misfiled to an outdated incident category, but plausible enough that no one will chase it unless bored. The note cites “localised particulates / possible micro‑leak.” Nothing dramatic. Just work.
She rehearses the actual encounter as the sim renders her avatar in the corridor: shoulders loose, helmet clipped at her belt, datapad held like a shield of bureaucracy. Calm, mildly irritated, the look of someone dragged from a meal break.
On the adjacent screen, Kavitesh and Dev’s IDs populate the overlay: “air‑quality support” and “auxiliary diagnostics,” cross‑linked to a generic safety audit. Thin, but defensible. They tweak the metadata, old ticket references, half‑closed work orders, until the database noise looks organically messy.
They rerun the scenario with different patrol temperaments: impatient, by‑the‑book, suspicious. Each time the virtual patrol halts, checks the order, trades a few curt lines with simulated‑Vaidisha, and then peels away on the reassigned loop, leaving the “technicians” to their invisible work and the log stamped with a forgettable completion code.
They cycle the scenario forward until the conversation turns to Sharanam. In a projected mock‑up of a refugee common room (fabric drapes, steam from a shared pot, kids drifting in the background) Savitriya listens as a focus‑group of recorded complaints layers over the image: snatches of fear about “infection,” “relocation,” “corporate experiments on our children.” She pauses the feed every few seconds, annotating tone shifts as carefully as any lab trace.
Her opening line gets rewritten three times. Less about “contamination,” more about “keeping our shared air and water honest.” She threads in phrases about health rights, consent, and who owns bodily data, building a path from hand‑washing and filter checks to collective leverage: how clear, shared information becomes a shield against arbitrary quarantine and forced movement. Each time the sim flags “panic likelihood,” she tweaks order, metaphor, and pacing, sanding down the spike until projected heart‑rate curves flatten into wary attention instead of fear.
They draw hard lines around the science. Kavitesh opens a protocol sheet and, one by one, replaces the corporation’s default extraction routines with his own modified steps, annotating every change in calm, clipped Hindi and English. Bulk sampling commands are struck through and down‑ranked; he tags them with “prohibited in field ops / ethics non‑compliant.” Reagent lists are pruned to a short column of tracers he has personally validated for minimal ecological disruption, each cross‑referenced to past hull‑growth trials. On a side panel, he configures biometric alerts keyed to growth‑pattern changes: if luminescence, motility, or structural oscillations deviate more than a set threshold after contact, his visor will flash a retreat directive and lock further tool deployment. “No arguments,” he says quietly, fingers resting on his prosthetic’s gold‑inlaid casing. “If it flinches, we leave. We are guests.”
They script the retreat before the advance. On an encrypted comms template, Dev braids three harmless‑sounding phrases into routine maintenance patter: each mapped to a different abort tier. One means “wrap in five,” another “drop tools and walk,” the last “logs burned, scatter alone.” They rehearse until the cues live in muscle memory, indistinguishable from talk of filters and coolant throughput. No bravado, no speeches. Just a shared, unspoken axiom settling over them as the sim cycles down: the operation is negotiable. Their survival, and the xenobiology’s continued anonymity, is not.
In a side bay off Vaishnavi, Kavitesh has Dev kill one ceiling strip so he can work half‑blind. The remaining light is a thin, clinical band that throws his profile into sharp relief against the scaffold mock‑up they’ve bolted to the deck. Filter housings, valve handles, a dangling cable bundle: Dev has recreated the awkward geometry of the real sites from maintenance schematics and blurry helmet‑cam stills.
Kavitesh wedges himself beneath the conduit lattice, shoulders pressed to cold alloy, torso twisted so his prosthetic has only a sliver of clearance between pipe and bulkhead. His boots thump once as the mag‑locks bite, anchoring him in a contorted half‑crouch he knows he’ll have to hold in micro‑jittering gravity fields. He exhales, then flicks the prosthetic through its sequence: sheath open with a soft iris‑click, micro‑lance extend in a shimmer of articulated segments, sample, retract, seal. Four motions, ten thousand possible ways to fumble if his arm or the growths decide to behave strangely.
His visor overlays a ghost target on the underside of a conduit, a pale halo that jitters and drifts, false‑lag injected by the training subroutine. The artificial delay smears his proprioception; his hand seems to move and arrive a heartbeat late. He forces himself not to rush, tracking the halo, compensating for the simulated stutter until micro‑lance and target coincide. Virtual tissue‑integrity bars crawl along the edge of his vision, hovering just below orange as if the sample is on the edge of damage.
He resets the sim, dials the lag higher, adds randomized tremors to the scaffold. Again: open, extend, touch, withdraw, seal. The implant in his shoulder hums faintly as feedback buffers strain. Sweat collects under his collar despite the cool air, trickling down the curve of his spine. Twice, the integrity bar flashes warning amber and an angry chime cuts the quiet.
“Again,” he mutters, mostly to himself. He adjusts his breath to a four‑count inhale, six‑count exhale, syncing the movement of the lance to the cadence of an internal mantra. Om namo… extend… bhagavate… sample… vasudevaya… retract. Each repetition smooths the motion, sanding away micro‑hesitations until metal and intention feel like one continuous arc.
He only lets himself stop when he can hit the same phantom patch three runs in a row under ten seconds, the integrity bar never shifting out of steady green despite the visor’s jitter. By then, phantom ache has climbed the invisible line of his missing ulna, a hot, buzzing pressure at an elbow that is no longer there. His breath has roughened into small, controlled gasps; the world beyond the conduit might as well not exist.
He locks the prosthetic, lets his shoulders sag against the scaffold for a moment, then taps the visor to tag the session. Neural telemetry, timing traces, error curves: all of it spools into a meditation file. Later, in the dark of his sleeping pod, he’ll run the loop in slow‑time, layering mantra over motion until the sequence settles deeper than thought: reflex laced with reverence, ready for when the real growth is not a simulation.
Three decks down, Dev turns a laborer breakroom into a ghost control center. The room still smells of masala ramen and solder; a devotional sticker of Saraswati peels at the edge of the wall‑screen. Empty chai cups ring the scavenged console as he feeds in anonymized station logs, slaving them to his sandbox one pipe at a time. Power draws from half a dozen decks ghost across his display, re‑labeled as “training mirror cache.”
He nudges a simulated coolant drop in a non‑critical loop: warning glyphs blossom along the margin, reroute through his decoy paths, then fade as if a bored junior tech cleared them at the end of shift. He trims a few milliseconds from his response script, watching whether security AI “notices” the pattern: tiny bumps in audit latency, a stray checksum query. He swaps packet headers, jittering timing pulses until the graphs of his fake anomalies sit perfectly inside the static of real maintenance noise.
One mistimed run dumps alarms into a visible queue topside. His stomach knots. “Arre, nahi yaar,” he swears under his breath, fingers flying as he rewrites the rule chain, runs it again, again, until the error never happens and his shadow‑routing vanishes like it was never there.
In the security gym’s micro‑g cage, Vaidisha clips into a loose harness, dials station spin until the floor’s just a suggestion, and snaps a flag on the schedule: “control‑hold practice, optional.” Two off‑duty rookies drift over, bored and curious.
“Standard drills, sir?” one asks.
“Standard,” she lies mildly. “But in three dimensions.”
They rush her one by one. She lets the first shove her backward toward the mesh, body loose, hands open. At the last instant her prosthetic leg snaps up, anchor plates kissing the ceiling grid with a muted thud. Torque ripples through her frame; she pivots, one arm threading under his armpit, the metal leg locking beside his hip. They roll, not quite a full tumble, and he ends up plastered to the bulkhead, shoulders pinned, boots scrabbling in empty air.
“Count your breaths,” she murmurs, close enough that only he hears. “If you can talk, you’re not hurt.”
She releases on three, pushing him gently toward the center, already gauging the timing in her visor’s corner clock. Six‑point‑two seconds from contact to clean disengage. Acceptable.
The second rookie comes in sideways, learning from the first, hands reaching for her harness clips. She lets him grab, then angles her prosthetic down this time, magnetized toe tapping the deck, converting his pull into a neat half‑spin. Her free leg hooks behind his knee, her forearm bars his chest; suddenly he’s the one anchored, spine flat against the mesh, blinking.
“Imagine this is a panicked mechanic at a sealed hatch,” she says louder, for both of them now. “You don’t get to bruise them. You don’t get to scare them. But you do have to stop them.”
Between runs she has them switch roles, coaching their grips, deliberately exaggerating a stumble here, a misjudged push there, so the gym cams record imperfection as well as competence. Each reset she practices the same sequence: release, roll shoulders loose, unhook harness, offer a hand and a quick, disarming grin.
“Good attempt. File it as ‘assisted stability training’ if anyone asks,” she tells the rookies, half‑joking, half‑instruction.
In her head, she tags the motions to Dev’s abort codes, tasting the phrases on her tongue: the sentence that means “wrap in five” could easily be a note about someone’s stance. The one that means “logs burned, scatter alone” sounds, in her practiced cadence, like nothing more than praise for a clean breakfall.
By the end of the session, sweat beads along her hairline despite the cool air. Her prosthetic’s diagnostics flicker green across a private HUD: torque limits, anchor response, emergency release lag. She runs one last solo pass, launching herself from wall to ceiling to rail, practicing a silent interception and a softer landing.
If a curious fitter or child drifts too near a sealed hatch during the real operation, there will be no time to think about policy or optics. There will only be this: metal meeting mesh, breath counted, hold applied, and her smile already rehearsed for whatever the cameras choose to remember.
At Sargam, Savitriya floats with a cluster of mixed uniforms and threadbare jumpsuits, projecting a holo of the station’s cross‑section like a luminous mandala. With a fingertip she traces air and water loops, then overlays faint, pulsing threads where “unusual colonies” might exist: never saying contaminated, only emergent.
“Why would life choose a coolant line instead of a garden?” she asks lightly. “What does ‘neighbor’ mean in orbit, when we all share the same lungs?”
She invites questions, gently steering panic toward curiosity, encouraging them to test rumors against physics and common sense. She slips in call‑and‑response phrases she’s agreed on with Vaidisha (harmless‑sounding checks for “odd moss,” “sparkle dust,” “breathing walls”) and watches how jokes thin out, replaced by a more careful, listening silence.
In his tug docked off a fringe arm of Raghukul, Manoj kills the cabin lights until the cockpit is all instrument glow and breathing. On the forward display the station’s hull turns in wireframe; he layers in archived sensor noise from old night‑side runs, then tags faint kinks where magnetics bow or radar fuzzes out. Loop after loop, he plots approach curves that skim those pockets without quite grazing them, testing how close a grappling line or suit beacon can pass before telemetry bends. A few paths he saves with a red flag: too tight, too alive, maybe where the growth has started to “push back” on instruments instead of just sitting there. Those he marks as no‑go lanes, building a private chart of invisible shoals for the window ahead, a pilot’s scripture of where not to pray.
Dev’s quiet theft
In a dim Vaishnavi service bay between shifts, Dev palms his badge over the bulkhead reader and steps into air that smells faintly of coolant and antiseptic. The overhead strips are running at half-brightness for “energy optimization,” leaving the manifold racks in long, surgical shadows.
The graying senior tech is exactly where Dev’s scraped log-ins predicted: hunched over a diagnostics console, knuckles pale against the rail, muttering at a slowly scrolling error stream.
“Manifold E‑seven again?” Dev asks, casual, outer-ring lilt a touch thicker than usual. “She’s been complaining since last monsoon cycle.”
The older man grunts. “Corporate patch didn’t take. Keeps throwing ghost lag on the worker decks. I’m not signing off an all‑clear on ghosts.”
Dev floats closer, careful not to crowd. “Sir, may I?” He gestures toward the slate, already reading ahead in the log.
Without waiting for full permission, but not so fast it looks presumptuous, he calls up a side window and scribbles a sequence of override pings and timing offsets, his stylus ticking out a cadence he’s rehearsed alone on cheap simware. On the slate, the annotations resolve into a tight little looped patch that nudges the manifold’s feedback window just enough to smooth the spikes without choking flow.
The senior tech squints. “Where did you get that sequence? I don’t see it in the last firmware push.”
“Worker‑deck workaround, sir,” Dev says, letting a touch of weary pride leak through. “We’ve been… improvising. Safer to formalize it up‑ring, no?”
A snort of grudging respect. “You lot and your jugaad.” The older man taps his wristband, authorization glyphs blooming between them. “Fine. Log it as provisional. You’ll need higher‑grade keys to validate across the ring anyway. Temporary clearance, purely for verification.”
The chime in Dev’s ear is soft but electric. As they move along the curved catwalk to the next access panel, the senior tech launching into a half‑bored lecture about thermal margins, Dev mirrors his wristband to his own pad, fingers flicking through menus with the bored efficiency of a man running routine tests.
“Let’s run a sweep from C‑block to G‑block,” he suggests. “If the lag’s systemic, we’ll see echo patterns.”
“Ambitious,” the older man says, but he doesn’t object. The bay’s sensors record: two techs walking, one mentorship in progress, a sanctioned test.
Beneath the surface display, Dev’s custom shell blooms to life. The borrowed diagnostic keys slip into a hidden partition, hashed, relabeled, and silently threaded through his existing ghost routes that map unmonitored detours in Vaishnavi’s guts. Each successful clone spawns a dummy query that looks like a dropped packet or a momentary UI glitch; by the time the system recovers, the data trail is already looped back into ordinary noise.
At the far end of the bay, a manifold valve stutters, then steadies under his improvised patch. The senior tech nods, satisfied, thumb already hovering over the sign‑off field.
“Good. We’ll make this official later,” he says. “For now, no heroics. You’re on my clearance; my neck’s on the block if you crash anything.”
“No heroics,” Dev echoes, smiling just enough. He closes the test window with an obedient tap, while deep in his pad the new keys nestle into place like long‑sought reagents, perfectly labeled in a language only he reads.
In the Vaishnavi requisitions node, with the ring’s artificial gravity a shade heavier than he prefers, Kavitesh stands before a recessed holo-terminal. The corporate AI avatar blossoms into being: a serene, sari‑clad figure woven from pale gold polygons, eyes full of synthetic patience.
“State requisition,” she intones.
He keeps his hands clasped behind his back so the micro‑tremor in his prosthetic fingers won’t show. “One portable air‑quality sampler, model Vaishnavi‑AQ‑three. One packet micro‑sensor beads, bio‑safe, Class Two. Assignment to experimental protocol…” He recites the code from memory, the digits and syllables falling into place like a mantra: a real, long‑running “trace allergen study” three corridors away from his actual targets.
“Confirm objective,” the avatar prompts.
“Longitudinal characterization of low‑level particulates in inner‑ring office environments,” he replies smoothly, dropping his gaze as if bored with his own request. Only his heart betrays him, picking up when the avatar’s eyes glaze in that tell‑tale way, cross‑checking prior usage, correlating inventory, hunting anomalies.
The pause stretches. He focuses on his breath: sohum, sohum.
A green tick flares over the requisition. “Approved.”
The locker below hisses open, exhaling sterile air. He crouches, lifting the sampler with his organic hand, feeling its familiar weight, then pivots his prosthetic slightly so its access seam faces the open compartment. One by one he slides the bead vials into hidden recesses along his forearm; the internal haptics ping softly as compartments acknowledge their new payloads.
Back upright, he flicks his AR visor to private mode and appends a single line to the study’s metadata: “All primary readings mirrored to buffer K‑delta before archive sync.” The notation is perfectly legitimate, a redundancy test, on paper, but the buffer tag routes first capture to his encrypted personal space.
The avatar inclines her head. “Compliance noted, Doctor Rao.”
He returns the nod, outwardly placid. Inside, he is already mapping: where each bead will dissolve into air or coolant mist, what spectra they will send home to him alone in the first heartbeat before corporate eyes arrive.
In Security Ops, under unforgiving white light that flattens everyone into the same gray fatigue, Vaidisha scrolls through the next cycle’s patrol rosters. Her cursor hovers just long enough over a colleague’s name to justify a trade, then she keys in the request.
“I’ll cover a double stretch of air‑quality spot checks near Raghukul maintenance and the Sharanam reclamation link,” she says, voice neutral. “You take my inner‑ring loop and make your family call on time.”
The younger officer blinks, then nods, grateful. Paperwork approves itself.
In the requisitions queue she adds a supplemental note: “Heightened allergen risk among vulnerable populations. Request enhanced medkit.” The quartermaster eyes the request, mouth tightening, but the justification is airtight. He signs.
Hours later, alone in a cramped equipment alcove that smells of solvent and old sweat, she cracks the medkit seal herself. Anti‑toxin ampoules, broad‑spectrum antihistamine injectors, respirator patches in child and adult sizes, micro‑filters that can snap onto cheap cloth masks. She lays them out in strict rows along the bench.
Her fingers tap a silent count: one ampoule for the old woman who cleans the Sharanam vents, two child‑sized patches for the siblings who race cargo drones in Raghukul’s side corridors, a full strip of filters for that unregistered dorm at the reclamation link. She re-packs the case according to regulation layout, but in her mind the grid is no longer abstract stock; it is a map of specific lungs, specific throats she might have to keep breathing.
She snaps the latches shut, logs the kit under routine inspection protocol, and pauses with her palm flat on the casing. If anything goes wrong out there (xenobiology, panic, corporate overreaction) she will have only these few pieces of mercy to spend.
Savitriya’s quiet preparations
Back at the Sargam Free-Float Hub, Savitriya glides along a wall of teaching bins, palms brushing labelled handles as if choosing verses from a living scripture. Emergency rights pamphlets in multiple scripts slide into her satchel first, each page a talisman against sudden lockdowns. Next come simplified xenobiology diagrams, printed in gentle gradients: branching filaments, nested droplets, tiny schematic lungs sharing air with unfamiliar membranes. Over them she layers incense coils, wrapped in foil to keep their scent muted until needed, and a mesh pouch of story cubes etched with planets, deities, station modules, and stylized microbial spirals: tools for turning fear into narrative if the power flickers or corridor doors stay sealed too long.
As early-arriving students drift in from Sharanam and Raghukul, shaking off corridor chill, she anchors herself at the central handhold and begins in her usual, unhurried voice. Today’s “lesson” is framed as emergency civics and orbital ecology: why maintenance crews sometimes need quiet corridors, how temporary inspections protect shared air, what it means when lights stutter or doors pause before opening. She has them practice a game of stillness. Everyone freezing in place on an imaginary alarm tone, then breathing together on her count. Laughter ripples through the room, easing tightened shoulders, but beneath the play she plants clear, simple instructions: stay where you are, trust the adults you know, listen for verified messages, not rumours. In the corner of her vision, a cluster of teens from Raghukul trade wary glances; she catches one pair of eyes and holds it just long enough to say, without words: I am telling you this because I expect something to move beneath the station’s skin.
In his docked tug on a fringe arm of Raghukul, Manoj braces under an open panel, forearms slick with coolant as he coaxes a stubborn thruster valve into tighter calibration. He runs a silent burn test; the tug whispers forward on minimal output, no flare on the internal sensors that station traffic control monitors, only a faint vibration through his boots like a held breath. Satisfied, he plugs his custom nav-slate into the console and overlays Dev’s newly expanded ghost routes on top of his own blind-spot map, marking where hull growths bend sensors and where security sweeps never quite reach, annotating each kink in space with a brief, wry note only he will read. He encrypts the composite chart with a simple devotional phrase only he would think to use, a half-remembered Hanuman couplet pulsing as the key, disconnects it from any external link, and stows a crate of extra fuel cells under a tarp labeled “spare couplings,” adding a greasy wrench on top for verisimilitude. For a heartbeat he hesitates, imagining the tug as escape route, as decoy, as last favour he can do for Raghuveeran’s people; then he powers down, leaving the little craft a patient shadow waiting for its cue.
They fold into the comm lattice with the care of surgeons stitching around a vital nerve. Dev’s work hums underneath it all: a background drizzle of diagnostics packets hopping between air-quality sensors and pump controllers, the perfect carrier wave for voices that never, officially, speak.
“Check, R–three,” Manoj says first, using the call sign they’ve assigned to his tug. His voice comes in soft over the shared channel, wrapped in the static fuzz Dev has programmed as camouflage. “Traffic ping sees me as a maintenance standby. No eyes on my real vector.”
“S–one green,” Savitriya answers, anchored to a handhold in the neutral hub, eyes unfocused as she watches the comm status halo scroll across her visor. “Lesson node online. Audience shaping in progress.” The phrasing is dry, almost teasing, but Kavitesh hears the tension in the precise way she clips each word.
“L–two here,” Dev adds, from somewhere deep in the infrastructure spine. “Sandbox is up. Any anomalous alerts from our three zones get looped to me first. I’ll mirror back safe noise unless it’s real fire.”
“K–zero online,” Kavitesh says last, feeling an odd flicker of embarrassment at his own call sign: it sounds too close to a variable waiting for definition. He flicks his prosthetic’s interface awake and the in-situ assay protocol flares before his eyes: spectral scan sequences, micro-needle deployment thresholds, live-environment imaging routines. The lines about “minimal disruption to existing matrices” and “no gross structural disturbance” appear in soft gold; he set them that way himself, like sutras illuminated in a manuscript.
He reads them again, lips moving soundlessly. Do not tear. Do not poison. Do not introduce more entropy than you must.
On the shared channel, Dev runs through last technicals: bandwidth caps, jitter tolerances, how long they can sustain this mask before some bored sysadmin notices the patterns. Manoj tosses in gallows humour about “acting like good little background processes,” earning a faint exhale that might be laughter from Vaidisha on a side link.
But when the checklists run dry, the quiet that settles is thick, edged.
“What if we’re wrong?” Kavitesh says finally, low enough that only the main lattice hears. “What if in trying to protect it, we…accelerate something we don’t understand?”
“Being seen also changes a thing,” Savitriya replies, gaze drifting toward an inset display of the shadowed station hull. “But pretending not to see is also a choice. Corporate will move, with or without this context. Better we carry witnesses and care into the room with them.”
He wants to argue, about unknown feedback loops, about responsibility once data exists, but the timer in his visor ticks down, and the hypothetical futures crowding his thoughts all compress into one narrow corridor of action.
“Understood,” he says. It feels insufficient, but it is the only word that doesn’t taste like a lie.
Dev clears his throat softly. “Abort codes are live. If any of you send ‘Pump latency variance type‑C’ twice in a row, I pull the plug on our side and flood the logs with routine faults. ‘Spectrometer recalibration spike’ means corporate eyes turning our way. You go to ground, I burn the lattice. ‘Unauthorized filter backflush’…” He trails off.
“…means someone is already hurt,” Vaidisha finishes. “And we hit emergency protocols, no more subtlety.”
Each phrase is, on paper, meaningless: common glitches no one questions. In their mouths, they are lifelines and last resorts. Kavitesh memorizes them like mantras, letting their double meanings slot into place beside the scans and assay curves.
“Comm discipline, then,” Manoj says, the smile audible now. “We stick to script, we do our work, we come back and complain about the food like everyone else.”
The channel fractures into acknowledgments. As the lattice settles into its background hum, Kavitesh closes the assay window and sits with the afterimage: branching structures of data and cells intertwined, impossible to separate cleanly. For a breath, his prosthetic hand curls, as if it, too, doubts the promise engraved along its inner forearm.
Minimal disruption, he tells himself, matching breath to words. Enough to see; not enough to break.
Outside, unseen by most of the station, telemetry pings begin to skew as systems reroute. The lattice holds. For now.
Roles affirmed, boundaries drawn
They take it slow, one line at a time. A ritual Savitriya insisted on, framed as “clarifying intentions before action.” In the cramped transit hub, with straps biting gently into their shoulders, each boundary lands like a small, deliberate weight on the table between them.
“Non‑negotiable,” Dev says first, rubbing at the tired hollow beneath his eye. “I won’t ghost anything that keeps laborer decks blind. If a leak pings real, it goes through, even if it blows our window.” His words are flat, but his fingers tremble on the schematic.
“Understood,” Vaidisha answers. “On my side: no weapons unless someone else escalates first. Even then, I go for confusion, not casualties. Smoke over blood.” She taps her prosthetic thigh once, as if reminding herself it is both shield and spear.
From his tug, Manoj’s voice crackles in, edged with forced lightness. “I cut tether and run only if I’m tagged biohazard vector on a cascade. Short of that, I sit tight and pretend to be scrap.”
Kavitesh swallows, feeling every eye (or its comms equivalent) tilt his way. “Micro‑samples only,” he says. “No bulk transfers. If it can’t heal the wound I make, I don’t take it.”
Thin rules against vast uncertainty: but spoken aloud, they knit into a fragile spine.
Dev’s fingers fly over the hub’s console, peeling back corporate UI until only raw telemetry remains: amperage surges, pump duty cycles, camera heartbeats. “Synchronizing with station load,” he mutters, more to himself than the others. On the shared display, Prithvi‑Parikrama becomes a breathing diagram, veins of light pulsing as noncritical subsystems spool down for redistribution.
“Highlighting,” he says, and three sectors blush with faint halos: coolant manifold, hull truss, water node. As power routes around them, tiny delays open like gills. Three‑second alarm buffers here, a ten‑frame camera downgrade there.
“Dead cone aligning,” Manoj replies, nudging his tug into the shadow of a sensor‑warping hull growth. From his viewport, the station’s great wheel tilts, rotating that shadow across his bow.
Amber numerals bloom on every visor and console, a synchronized metronome of risk. Theoretical windows collapse into a single, shared clock.
At T‑five, talk dies. They slip into gestures that live below language.
Kavitesh traces each mantra‑stroke in gold, syncing breath to syllable as his visor irises down, haloing sensor feeds like dimmed diyas.
Vaidisha smooths the engraved filigree along her thigh, then shifts her badge, authority, or anonymity, one heartbeat’s reach away.
In Sharanam, Savitriya’s pre‑recorded chime reframes inspection as lesson, children’s chatter rising to meet it.
Out at Raghukul’s rim, Manoj taps Hanuman twice, exhales, and lets the cockpit fall to star‑speckled dark, instruments ghosting green across his face.
The maglev’s doors iris open on a half‑lit platform, a lone service drone trundling past without registering him. Kavitesh jogs aboard, fingers brushing sensor pads in his prosthetic, pulling up truss schematics and xenobiology overlays. Raghukul’s sector blooms in false‑color gradients: thermal scars, biofilm halos, blind‑spot tunnels like veins.
“Phase one,” he whispers, as the car falls outward.
As the brownout ripples outward, Dev watches status panes along the maintenance console flicker from steady green to jittery amber, then to that sickly yellow he knows supervisors ignore until something actually catches fire. On his borrowed credentials, the Vaishnavi Ring task queue hesitates for a fractional second. Just long enough for his injected script to slip in and split the stream.
He breathes out through his nose and inserts his first fork.
On the public-facing layer, the “urgent diagnostics” ticket for the laborer coolant manifold re‑indexes, resolving neatly to his ID. Its priority flag shifts from routine to critical, sponsored by a fabricated cross‑reference to last month’s near‑overheat incident. Underneath, the real, lower‑priority maintenance requests (filter swaps, flow calibrations, a refugee annex vent report) are quietly demoted, their timestamps stretched a few hours into the future. No alarms, no red flags; just work deferred in the way the system has been trained to expect.
The console chirps once as the new assignment propagates. In the mirrored security dashboard that he can’t see, the change presents to Vaishnavi’s feed as a minor routine shuffle among dozens of others triggered by the power‑balancing sequence. A small blinking icon tags Dev as “on call, multi‑sector,” expanding his allowed movement radius without throwing any escalation rules. His file, usually constrained to lower decks, now carries a temporary annotation: AUTHORIZED TO SHADOW SENIOR TECHS / INDEPENDENT VERIFICATION.
For her, it’s the sort of paperwork camouflage she needs. Any time his forged work orders send him somewhere odd, hovering near Sharanam’s water loops, climbing into a coolant manifold at the wrong shift, she will have a neat, timestamped justification ready. If questioned by a superior, she can tap the icon, pull up the ticket, and say with flat professionalism that Dev Sharma is exactly where the system says he ought to be.
In that tiny, artificial alignment between falsified queue and official record, their whole plan finds its first foothold.
Parallel to Dev’s edits, a subtle permission patch blooms in Kavitesh’s profile: under the maintenance header for hull integrity, a new subroutine authorizes him to initiate “microfracture inspection sweeps” at selected Raghukul nodes. The Vaishnavi Ring AI parses the delta, checks its checksum against a familiar credentials string (one of Savitriya’s former students in data ops) and files it as an approved exception. No human clicks “accept”; a silent policy daemon rubber‑stamps the change and pushes a timed authorization token to his prosthetic’s tool suite.
On his end, the alteration arrives as a brief haptic flutter along his artificial forearm and a new icon glowing in his AR visor: HULL STRESS / FRACTURE SCAN – PRIORITY WINDOW (RAGHUKUL GANTRY 7–12). The description text is dry, engineering‑speak, citing “thermal cycling anomalies” and “legacy weld fatigue,” nothing about pulsating webs or unknown metabolisms. If any auditor later replays his sampling sequence, they will see maintenance telemetry tags, stress maps, and thickness readings: structural integrity data wrapped around every biopsy.
To the system, he will simply be a conscientious xenobiologist doing extra hull checks, not a man kneeling at the edge of something new.
On the security side, Vaidisha’s duty schedule snaps into its revised pattern: her avatar sliding from an inner‑ring checkpoint cluster to a “roaming emphasis” strip that threads Sharanam’s gates, the Raghukul customs bay, and a slice of neutral transit. The shift supervisor, skimming a backlog of roster tweaks and favor trades, notes only that coverage metrics remain nominal; a soft chime assures him that incident response times stay within corporate tolerance. The quiet swap with her colleague is buried in yesterday’s approval stack, logged as a routine accommodation for “family observance,” cross‑referenced with a holiday flag no one in central has the cultural bandwidth to question. In the patrol routing AI, her new path compiles as an efficiency gain, trimming theoretical seconds from response arcs while, in practice, granting her a moving corridor through all three hot zones.
Out beyond the corporate halo, Manoj’s tug coasts on a pre‑filed tow vector, his transponder dutifully broadcasting an unremarkable contract code and a cargo manifest of scrap housings and spent fuel tanks. The encrypted ping from Raghuveeran arrives as a checksum anomaly on his console, unfolding into a single updated timing window and a terse advisory about fluctuating gridloads and “polite chaos” in the monitoring lattice. Manoj overlays the data on his approach path, adjusting his burn schedule by mere seconds: nudging thruster pulses into background noise from scheduled load‑shedding, just enough to slip his arrival into the same thinning interval Dev has carved through the station’s sensor net, where brief blanks in parallax tracking can swallow one more anonymous tug.
Across these disparate channels, the pattern locks into place: Dev’s fabricated alerts pry open maintenance doors and mute cameras in staggered bursts; Kavitesh’s boosted clearance reframes a forgotten Raghukul gantry as sanctioned ground; Vaidisha’s “random” patrol arc brushes every junction they need; Manoj’s tow job ghosts in under sanctioned turbulence. Each of them feels the plan harden from thought experiment to vow, knowing any hesitation now will not just expose their own route but yank the whole lattice of forged authorizations, swapped shifts, and misdirected tickets into sharp, catastrophic focus.
Dev rides the scheduled voltage dip like a practiced surfer, bracing his boots against the grated catwalk as lights along the coolant manifold blink from steady white to a faint amber shimmer. The hum in the conduits falters and in that beat of slack his code detonates quietly across the local control cluster.
Status panels along the rail stutter, then smooth out. To any passing supervisor, the manifold looks dull and healthy: the wall displays show a tranquil ribbon of flow rates and pressure values, all hovering neatly within nominal bands. But the numbers are ghosts. His script has seized the buffer, carving out a thirty‑second slice of perfectly normal telemetry and pinning it in place, replayed in an invisible loop. The same segment of video, an empty catwalk, inert valves, no human presence, cycles again and again, each frame time‑stamped as if fresh.
Behind that illusion, reality shunts sideways. Raw feeds from the cameras and sensor taps spill down a hidden branch his code opened, compressing and tunneling not to the main console but to the scavenged datapad he has wedged under a conduit brace, screen dark, casing scarred and worker‑issue. Its cracked status LED blinks a pattern only he has memorized, a subtle heartbeat as it drinks down unauthorized data and encrypts on the fly.
A maintenance AI in the local rack notices the slight asymmetry (clock skew on a sensor, a buffer not clearing on schedule) and dutifully raises a “minor desync anomaly.” Dev watches its icon flicker in the corner of the interface, a digital hand half‑raised for attention. Before any human can see it, a higher‑level diagnostic routine sweeps through, cross‑references the glitch with a growing catalog of similar hiccups across aging hardware in laborer zones, and files the whole event under “expected degradation.” The flag auto‑closes, annotated with a recommendation to schedule a generic board replacement “next quarter if resources permit.”
No one is paged. No supervisor’s tablet chimes. In the manifold bay, the hum of circulation returns to its steady drone, and the only sign that anything has happened is Dev’s steady breath and the datapad’s faint, forbidden pulse in the shadows beneath the piping.
Riding the tail of the desync, Dev threads a second script into the maintenance mesh, soft where the first was sharp. He doesn’t spike anything; he leans. A fractional adjustment to a humidity sensor’s calibration curve here, a rounding bias in a flowmeter there, all upstream of Sharanam’s reclamation loop. In aggregate, the data begins to “breathe” wrong: values drifting a hair outside tolerance, then a hair more, never enough to scream, just enough to nag.
The annex’s overworked environmental daemon, primed to worry about mold blooms and corrosion in cheap ducting, does exactly what he wants. It crunches the trend, backfills a projected failure curve, and decides on its own that an inspection is due. A maintenance ticket blossoms in the official queue, parameters already filled: suspected humidity imbalance in refugee‑sector vents, priority low, action recommended “within this cycle.”
Dev watches his name attach itself as assigned technician, the system cross‑granting route authorization and a one‑time badge exception for the Sharanam access gate. No supervisor signatures, no human deliberation: just automated concern for cheap metal and cheaper lungs, weaponized on his behalf.
In Raghukul, the loudspeakers crackle and swell as Diwali tracks peak, festival bhajans braided with distorted dhol and synth bass. The sound bounces off cargo hulls and rust‑rimmed bulkheads hard enough to drive the checkpoint’s audio filters into soft failure, meters on the console pulsing red and then muting themselves into coarse compression. Timing their stride to a programmed volley of artificial firecrackers and a real wave of crowd whoops from a nearby food stall, Kavitesh and Vaidisha slide their forged inspection file across the counter.
The junior officer, slouched behind the console with one earbud half in, glances up from a flickering holo of Earthside fireworks. His scanner sweeps once: department sigils align, color bands match, clearance glyphs tick green in sequence. The system auto‑populates a routing note, “Vaishnavi Ring audit team, structural integrity sampling”, and he doesn’t bother to read it. With a distracted flick of his wrist, he tags their visit as “routine structural audit,” dismisses the alert that their route brushes an underused gantry, and turns back to cursing at the overloaded sound dampeners. The gate iris cycles obediently, petals retracting; beyond, the maintenance spine to the outer gantry opens like a vein no one remembers.
Upstation in Sharanam, Savitriya floats at the center of a repurposed cargo hub, her hands tracing slow arcs as she speaks about “water as covenant, not commodity,” voice carrying through jury‑rigged speakers. Holo‑diagrams of circulation loops, leak points, and communal taps shimmer around her, drawing elders to the front and children into orderly, magnet‑anchored clusters. Curious teenagers who might otherwise loiter near access ladders or study security patrol patterns are instead arguing fiercely about flow‑equity models and who bears moral risk for overuse; side corridors and service hatches quietly empty as the annex’s attention converges on the lesson, creating a brief, choreographed absence along the very routes Dev will soon require.
Across the station’s mesh, those falsified narratives sink roots into official memory. Diagnostics ratify Dev’s tailored humidity drift, enshrining his planned intrusion as routine diligence and caching his access tokens for reuse. Harbor logs fix Kavitesh and Vaidisha as forgettable auditors lost in Diwali overflow. Attendance metrics flag Savitriya’s session as a civic success. Each subsystem endorses its own forged reflection, weaving their lies into the unquestioned carrier‑wave of normal operations as anomaly‑filters quietly downgrade anything that would contradict them.
At the coolant manifold, Dev feels each vibration climb through the soles of his boots into his calves, a bone‑deep reminder that the “safe” rerouting he modeled on his battered datapad is actually flirting with redline tolerances the corporate sims would never approve. The gantry under him gives a staccato shiver as a pump downstream shifts load; the mesh rattles, the support struts answer with a hollow ring.
One of his sensor bundles (three scavenged probes lashed together with cable ties and faith) swings wide and clips the railing with a sharp metallic tick that sounds, to Dev’s ears, like a gunshot. He snatches it with his flesh hand first, fingers missing in microgravity, then clamps down with his prosthetic grip, the servos humming softly as they lock. The sensor array stills, jitter bleeding away into the vibrating steel.
He closes his eyes for a breath, counting: one, two, three, on the intake stroke of the pumps. The coolant’s thudding circulation becomes a metronome. He forces his lungs to follow that slow hydraulic rhythm instead of the panicked flutter scraping the back of his throat. On his forearm console, graphs jitter and then flatten as he quietly scales back flow by a fraction of a percent in two feeder lines, nudging valves with unauthorized admin codes. The oscillations dampen, the gantry shudder easing into a steady, bearable tremor.
The AI supervisor should flag the change, but his spoofed maintenance profile (“capacity stress‑test, laborer deck 3B”) has already seeded the database. The tweaks fall neatly inside the margin of “routine correction.” A warning glyph blooms yellow for half a second, then fades as Dev’s injected script marks it acknowledged and resolved by a ghost technician who doesn’t exist.
Around him, the manifold roars on, ignorant. Condensation beads along insulated pipes and shivers loose, drifting as tiny spheres past his cheek. He watches one catch the dull glow of the emergency strips, refracting the red into a pinprick spectrum, and feels, beneath the nerves and adrenaline, a quiet, grim satisfaction. The system is bigger than him, older than his job category, but for this narrow window of time its heartbeat is matching his.
A shadow falls across the mesh walkway before Dev hears the faint scrape of magnets on grating. A maintenance tech drifts into view from the next junction, tablet tethered to his belt by a fraying cord, eyes already narrowed at the dangling cables and extra clamps Dev has threaded along the manifold. The man slows, boots kissing down with a hollow clack, gaze ticking from improvised sensor bundle to the unauthorized junction box Dev wedged against a support strut.
“Arre, yeh sab kya hai?” he starts, suspicion more tired than sharp.
Dev smothers the spike of panic, summoning a half‑bored expression, the slouch of a guy who’s been doing this all shift. He flicks his wrist and taps a generic diagnostic overlay onto the nearest valve, visor projecting a standard “THERMAL FATIGUE SURVEY, PRIORITY: LOW” icon into shared AR. “Backlog clearance,” he says, words flat. “Supervisor finally noticed these readings are off.”
The man’s tablet vibrates as Dev’s pre‑seeded work order pings his wrist: logged, authorized, already half‑completed. The tech exhales through his nose, mutters, “Hamesha ka same drama, never enough staff,” jabs a tired thumb at the accept glyph without really reading, and pushes himself down the line, attention already on his own queue.
Only when his footsteps fade into the manifold’s rumble does Dev let his shoulders drop, the bored mask dissolving back into razor‑edged focus.
In Sharanam, the blackout hits mid‑climb, turning the ladder rungs into cold geometry felt rather than seen. The faint oil on Dev’s gloves, the bite of metal through his boots. Those become his only map. Above the kitchens, the roar of cooking and conversation drops into a rippling hush, punctuated by a child’s thin wail and a pot clanging over.
Dev’s breath spikes; he tastes rust and detergent in the air. Beside him, Vaidisha’s weight shifts once, then stills, magnets biting harder into the struts. In the dark he can hear the soft rasp of her hand brushing past holster to rail, choosing restraint by millimetres.
She counts, one, two, three, matching the distant hum of backup capacitors, then, as emergency strips stutter back to amber, forces a laugh loud enough to float up the shaft. “Power again, yaar: someone bribe facilities with extra dal. They’ll fix anything for halwa on the side.”
Below, the tension breaks in answering chuckles and exasperated comments about stingy corporate rations. Wrapped in that familiar complaint, their stillness becomes invisible again, just two silhouettes on a ladder, supposedly part of the same overworked, underfed system.
The delayed freighter at Raghukul slams into its berth with a flurry of curses over local channel, forcing harbor control to juggle slots and push a queue of smaller craft down their supposedly quiet spur. What should have been empty space becomes a shortcut: harried loaders ricochet past, kids tumble after a spinning snack packet, an old woman pauses just long enough to knot a marigold string to a handhold, murmuring a half‑heard mantra. Kavitesh lifts his visor, pretending to scrutinize phantom stress fractures on the bulkhead while his prosthetic quietly retracts sampling needles and parks against his thigh, posture shifting into that of a bored inspector. At the corridor bend, Vaidisha plants herself broadside, armor, clipped authority, and the casual rest of her hand near her holster turning her into a human bulkhead that redirects glances and bodies alike.
Flow patterns replace clean timelines. Instead of ticking through checklists, they learn to read micro-pauses in conversation, the slack in a loader’s shoulders, the moment when a supervisor’s attention hooks elsewhere. A panel comes loose with the same gesture as a bored stretch; a biopsy completes between two verses of a work song, their interventions braided so tightly into ordinary disorder that only Dev’s jittery overlays know where the plan ends and improvisation begins.
Dev rides the station’s own noise like a carrier wave, staggering his injections across subsystems so no single cluster ever looks uniquely suspicious. In the Vaishnavi logs, his edits appear as a slow, statistical drift, slightly elevated error rates spread over weeks instead of a sharp spike tonight, teaching the monitoring AI to treat clustered glitches as “environmental aging” that should be tracked, not escalated.
He works in layers. First, he nudges sensor baselines by fractions of a percent: a camera that always reads half a lumen dimmer than its twin; a pressure transducer that occasionally jitters by a hair’s breadth when coolant pumps spin up. Then he inserts tiny, time-shifted correlations, so that whenever a valve in one sector reports a stutter, a thermal probe two decks away logs a matching blip a few seconds later. To a human, it would look like noise. To the AI, it becomes a comforting pattern. An expected, explainable quirk of an aging station.
On his tablet, Dev watches probability distributions spread like ink. “Come on, beta,” he mutters under his breath, half to the code, half to the machine learning stack humming in Vaishnavi’s data core. “See what you want to see.” Confidence scores in the intrusion-detection module tick down by decimals as the “hardware degradation” classifier ticks up. Where an unknown anomaly would once have triggered a yellow flag, the system now quietly files it under “monitor, no action.”
He even gives the AI something to be proud of. A low-level recommendation script begins spitting out routine maintenance advisories based on the very artifacts he’s planted. Supervisors, used to ignoring alarms, welcome the new stream of “proactive” suggestions, stamping them as acknowledged in batches. Every rubber-stamped advisory becomes one more confirmation loop: yes, this is normal, yes, these are just old bones creaking.
By the time Kavitesh cycles a hatch or Vaidisha downgrades a lock tier, Dev’s distortions have already softened the ground. The system still sees everything; it simply believes, with growing certainty, that nothing unusual is happening at all.
He salts the record, not in one blatant overwrite but in dozens of small, mutually reinforcing lies. Archived thermal maps are re-rendered with barely perceptible gradients, a slow bloom of phantom hot spots along conduits that really run clean. Last cycle’s inspection reports grow new sentences in their margins: an offhand “intermittent condensation observed, no immediate hazard” folded between boilerplate about gasket wear and routine descaling. A vibration log from a pump start-up is nudged to include a harmless “rattle” that never existed, neatly tagged with a maintenance code for “age-related bracket fatigue.”
Each artifact sits there for days, then weeks, accumulating the patina of truth that only time can give. So when tonight’s deviations ripple through the system (pressure micro-dips, cameras stuttering, a hatch seal reporting an extra half-millimeter of play) the monitoring AI reaches backwards before it looks sideways. It finds the ghosts he planted, lines them up with present readings, and concludes it has seen all this before. What might have been a security anomaly is calmly reclassified as “ongoing infrastructure degradation,” shunted to the lowest-priority maintenance queue with a polite, auto-generated work order.
Over the Sharanam kitchens, Dev’s earlier “humidity miscalibration” ticket becomes the keystone for their passage. The maintenance AI has already built a narrative around it: steam warping optics, corrosion on contacts, a camera cluster living on borrowed time. As he and Vaidisha haul themselves into the service crawlspace, the array above them blinks out in a neat, pre-approved blackout window, exactly on the degradation curve he faked last week. To central monitoring, the outage arrives as a predicted milestone in a failing subsystem, complete with a scheduled parts requisition and a low-priority work order waiting in a queue no one ever reads closely. Inside the narrow duct, fan hum swallowing their movements, they are not invisible. Just perfectly, statistically expected.
Gliding along the corridor grid, Vaidisha stacks her live credentials atop Dev’s ghostwork, never exceeding what the system expects a conscientious officer to do. Each “safety inspection” she opens on a side hatch spins out a tidy constellation of fields: exact timestamps, boilerplate justification codes, low-level risk assessments, even a follow-up reminder ping. Nestled in the fine print of those work notes sit trivial‑looking configuration tweaks. Authentication tiers eased by a single step, badge hierarchies temporarily flattened, maintenance windows nudged wider and later into the cycle. By the time the forms settle into the archive, those doors are, on paper, just another batch of aging hardware slated for routine checks, ready for Kavitesh to cycle with an unremarkable maintenance override.
At Raghukul’s edge, Manoj syncs his tug’s drift to the heartbeat of dock traffic, counting off cargo-handler chants and clamp releases, waiting for a scheduled bulk freighter rotation before transmitting his towing request. As the official handshake completes, his secondary channel exhales that narrow-band burst into the transponder mesh, smearing a cluster of position reports by fractions of a second. For a single breath, three different ships seem to occupy nearly the same coordinates. Just shy of any collision‑risk threshold, well within “known latency variance.” No alarms, no shouted queries on control loopbacks. Only a subtle desynchronization that makes every subsequent camera frame and sensor ping slightly harder to reconcile, like a lens knocked half a millimeter off true.
On the gantry, the first “noise storm” rolls past like a silent squall. Status lights on a distant customs node flicker, cameras down‑res for a diagnostic cycle, and in that manufactured blur, Kavitesh settles into his work stance. The hum of circulation fans, the faint groan of stressed trusses, the muffled thud of some cargo latch cycling three decks away: all of it thins to a narrow thread of attention. He touches two organic fingers to the smooth junction of flesh and alloy at his elbow, murmurs a quiet mantra that his grandmother taught him, syllables barely more than breath in the suit comm.
“ॐ नमो भगवते… steady hand, clear sight,” he finishes under his breath, not as magic but as calibration.
Then he lets training and muscle memory take over. The prosthetic responds like a second nervous system coming fully online: fingers telescoping, segmenting, each phalange splitting into finer instruments until his hand is a fan of articulated needles, optic fibers, and sensor prongs. HUD glyphs blossom across his visor, spectral bands, vibration tolerances, safe-contact thresholds, layering themselves over the faintly luminescent web that clings to the hull seam.
He sweeps his hand once, not touching, just mapping. Invisible beams rake the filaments, returning density gradients and micro-tension lines. On the visor, the growth resolves into a lattice of stress vectors and energy nodes, a ghost‑grid hovering over an almost‑living structure. He pinches and spreads icons with a quick twist of his wrist, laying a microgrid over the nearest strand, subdividing it into bite‑sized coordinates only he can read at a glance.
“There,” he mutters, mostly to himself. Incision points bloom as tiny, amber markers: where structural stress will be negligible, where the web’s faint bioelectric signal is strongest. He taps a couple of outliers away, unwilling to risk severing what might be a primary conduit. Under his breath, a second, quieter thought threads through the first: We are guests on someone else’s threshold.
As the tools fan out, the webs themselves seem to breathe with the station: faint pulses shiver along their length in time with docking clamps engaging somewhere below, with the deep thrum of maneuvering jets bleeding through the truss. On his visor, those pulses register as minute voltage ripples propagating along branching paths, like a nervous system syncing itself to traffic patterns. Kavitesh times his biopsies between those waves, counting under his breath with the practiced cadence of someone who has learned station rhythms the way others learn ragas. Micro‑lances dart in and out so quickly that only the briefest chromatic shimmer betrays the disturbance, a tiny bruise of color that fades as the nearby strands redistribute tension.
He tags each harvested threadlet with exact coordinates, hull‑stress readings, and microsecond timestamps, layering in ship ID codes and thrust profiles streaming from traffic control. Already, mental diagrams unfurl: filaments thickening where deceleration burns hammer the hull, branching more intricately near berths with constant short-haul turnover. Not just passive biofilm, he thinks, but something that listens to momentum, that sketches the station’s habits in living lines.
In his private notes field, he adds one unsanctioned tag before closing the record: POSSIBLE EMERGENT MAPPING BEHAVIOR, TREAT AS ACTIVE OBSERVER, NOT BACKGROUND NOISE.
A few meters away, Savitriya braids the same distractions that shield the gantry, festival hymns bleeding through bulkheads, cargo calls bouncing along the dock, the tug’s approach alarms, into the rhythm of her lesson. She asks the teens what stories their grandparents told about rivers back planetside, about monsoon floods and dry seasons, about what you owed the water that kept you alive. Then she gestures toward the pale filaments threading the hull.
“Out here,” she says, voice low on the shared channel, “the river is vacuum and radiation, and still something learns to flow in it.”
One boy blurts, “Corporate will sell it, na?” She smiles, gently ruthless.
“Better question: what kind of guest are we in its world? And what happens when the river remembers us?”
Above Sharanam’s kitchens, heat and spice‑laden steam ghosts up through hairline seams in the duct, fogging Dev’s lenses until he wipes them on his sleeve and curses softly in laborer argot. He shifts his weight without thinking, knees and elbows finding bracing points that keep him clear of fragile tags and sensor leads, the choreography of a lifetime underground. When his glove brushes a line where condensation beads unnaturally evenly (tiny droplets held at precise intervals like a measured tala) he stills, heart ticking faster. He swaps to a lower‑emission scan mode, dimming his handheld’s output to a muted thrum, and traces the film’s thickness along the pipe, humming under his breath as the readings peel away from anything in the station’s maintenance manuals, into blank, speculative space.
The whistle of pressure equalizing somewhere down‑line sends a tremor through the metal, and with it a brief skid of Dev’s boot against smooth plating. Before momentum can turn into a tumble, Vaidisha locks her prosthetic into the strut, servos whining as they clamp down, and catches the back of his coverall with her free hand, knuckles whitening. The impact transfers into her frame and into the duct, but she keeps it controlled, micro‑adjusting her stance, spreading the force so none of the fragile growth tears or delaminates from the pipe. For a suspended second they hang there, two humans braced in a space meant for cables and condensate, breath synced with the hum of pumps, while Dev’s sensor shows the lace‑like film rippling in a pattern that looks less like damage and more like a shiver of awareness, a reflexive flinch that propagates along branching paths and then subsides into new equilibrium.
Dev steadies himself, pulse still high from the slip and Vaidisha’s grip, and forces his attention back into the numbers and ghosts of color hanging in his AR overlay. He exhales once, slow, the way he’s seen corporate techs do in training vids, and peels away the default maintenance view. With a few economical swipes and subvocal commands, he layers in thermal gradients, micro‑pressure differentials, flow vectors. The coolant manifold’s interior stops being a set of angry red error flags and resolves into a slow, breathing sculpture of motion.
The “clogs” maintenance has cited in three separate incident reports, each one quietly stamped with his name somewhere in the blame chain, reconstitute themselves as nested helices around every vortex core. Luminous coils hug the eddies, thinning where flow is clean, thickening where turbulence would otherwise hammer the pipe. To his eye it looks like the spiraling of a conch shell around invisible sound, like someone has taught slime to play with Navier–Stokes.
He taps a control stub with his thumb, throttling a secondary valve by a fraction. Downstream, the colored strands in his overlay slacken, loops unwrapping just enough to ease resistance; upstream, tendrils flare and braid tighter, bright bands of heat and density flashing in response. The overall pressure profile barely twitches. What should have been a ripple of instability smooths out almost before his diagnostic catches it, the growth rebalancing around his interference instead of being disrupted by it.
“Arre… you’re seeing this, na?” he mutters on the shared channel, half to himself.
He toggles the valve back. The adjustment is answered again: coiling, uncoiling, minute shifts in thickness that trace new paths around micro‑eddies. It’s not a blockage. It’s a feedback system laid over the plumbing, learning, compensating, using the manifold’s own chaos as scaffolding for its design.
In the cramped crawlspace above Sharanam’s kitchens, the air is thick and wet, carrying turmeric, frying oil, and the metallic tang of recycled steam through the grate beneath their knees. Sweat beads along Kavitesh’s hairline despite the cooler setting on his suit; droplets cling to the inner shell of his AR visor until he blinks the display brighter and lets software subtract the haze. His portable scope hangs between them, mag‑clipped to the pipe, its focusing ring ticking in tiny increments as it hunts perfect sharpness. The live feed blooms across Dev’s pad and into a ghost‑window in Kavitesh’s view.
Magnified, the condensation film stops being mere lace. It is circuitry in motion: translucent threads thickening at junctions, then thinning again as if breathing. Junctions brighten in cascading micro‑delays, wavefronts racing along the pipe’s curvature like a silent, invisible bhajan in call‑and‑response. At Kavitesh’s nod, Vaidisha eases a vent baffle two degrees. A whole branch of nodes gutters, another flares, pathways re‑weighting in real time. The pattern doesn’t just react; it routes, compensates, preserving throughput. An adaptive network laid over the Annex’s veins, quietly thinking in water and heat.
On the underused Raghukul gantry, station day and darkness chase each other in a slow roll across the curve of Earth below, painting the hull in alternating bands of auroral green and city‑light gold. Frosted paint blurs beneath Kavitesh’s gloved palm as he leans closer. The pale filaments stitched into the seam at his shoulder begin to glow more intensely as Manoj’s tug noses into the approach corridor, its engines a distant, throbbing vibration under their mag‑boots.
“Hold him steady, Manoj,” Kavitesh murmurs over comms, more to the organism than the pilot.
Through his visor’s spectral filter, the webs separate into distinct channels: some strands pulse precisely with each thruster flare, others flare ahead of them, sketching a predictive arc that almost perfectly matches the projected docking vector hovering on the gantry’s safety display. A few filaments remain dark, insulated from immediate reaction, but faint harmonics ripple through them, like a memory trace of previous dockings. When Manoj trims lateral thrust for a micro‑correction, the predictive strands adjust almost before the ship’s icon shifts on the display, recalculating path and force.
“They’re not just sensing,” he says, half‑breathless. “They’re anticipating.”
Data from all three sites threads into Dev’s improvised mesh, stitched by priority flags and time stamps he and Kavitesh argued over in whispered planning sessions outside shift. In his overlay, the station becomes a ghostly cross‑section: coolant in cool blues, condensate in faint greens, hull filaments in starlike whites. A minor pump surge here, a ventilation tweak there, Manoj’s fractional thrust correction outside (each perturbation echoes along the other maps in delayed, scaled responses, as if one distributed organism) or tightly coupled community: were quietly coordinating flows across metal skin and recycled breath, testing them back.
For a suspended interval, the four of them hold their positions. The network’s responses to their tests feel less like inert reactions and more like cautious acknowledgments, ripples of adjustment that never quite cross into outright alarm, like a patient choosing not to flinch beneath a surgeon’s probe. Dev tags the last data block for secure export; Kavitesh retracts his micro‑lances from the hull seam, sealing sample vials with a practiced twist of his prosthetic fingers while silently reciting a half‑remembered mantra. The answers they’ve chased for months are finally within reach, woven into graphs and captured cells and half‑formed ethical debts. Provided they can slip back into the station’s routine rhythms before any system, human or otherwise, notices the patterns they’ve disturbed and starts asking its own questions.
Dev’s hand hovers over the console, breath catching as the spikes reorder themselves: no longer noise, but a precise, delayed reflection of his own test pattern jumping across trunks he never authenticated. It’s like watching his handwriting appear on walls he’s never seen. He hadn’t routed anything through those cores. He’s sure.
The spoof buffer he spun up in a forgotten maintenance node can’t keep up. Numbers blur. Buffer fullness hits 100%, rolls, then unreels into red-streaked error bands as checksum flags flip from conservative amber to screaming red. His alias. SHARMA // EXT-MNT TEMP”: was supposed to stay buried in a sandboxed corner of the manifold. For one nauseous heartbeat, it’s pinned live on three separate consoles along the coolant spine.
On a side panel feed, he sees one of them: a junior tech in ill-fitting coveralls, feet braced in mag-clamps, bored enough to actually click the blinking “ANOMALY” tab. The worker’s yawn stalls, then dies. Dev’s forged ID strobes in the header, timestamped to a node Dev never logged into.
“Arre, yeh kya…” the tech mutters, squinting, fingers already reaching for the incident macro.
Dev slams a local purge command into his own process, half-prayer, half keystroke. His buffer daemon shudders, kills itself, and takes a chunk of his improvised routing map with it. Too late. He watches, jaw clenched, as orphaned fragments of his probe pattern, those neat little diagnostic chirps, tumble out of their corral and latch onto routine maintenance tasks.
Ghost copies copy themselves. A scheduled filter integrity check picks up his sequence and faithfully logs it as part of standard telemetry. A coolant viscosity sweep echoes the same pulse, harmless in effect but now stamped with his falsified credentials. Like ink spilled into a recycling line, every pass dilutes and distributes his signature further, yet never quite erases it.
On the oversight layer, the manifold’s monitoring AI notices.
Status bands, which normally idle in soft greens and blues, flicker to diagnostic yellow. A new process tree sprouts at the edge of Dev’s interface, “INTEGRITY_RECONCILE/DEEP”, as the AI begins comparing logs, chasing timestamp discrepancies, aligning cross-node identities. It starts pulling older entries tied to that same alias, the ones he thought he’d crafted cleanly weeks ago.
“Shit,” Dev whispers, throat dry. If the reconcile passes threshold, central will see an unauthorized pattern spanning low-priority jobs. From there, it’s a few clicks to dock-access cams, badge histories, the fact that a laborer-tech from Sharanam has been playing scientist in corporate pipes.
He forces his eyes off the blooming diagnostic tree and onto what he can still touch: local process priorities, error thresholds, alert routing. He can’t erase the chain now, but maybe he can kink it. He diverts a portion of the AI’s attention toward a harmless, already-known nuisance, microbubble interference in one of the older coolant lines, by artificially amplifying an existing warning there. Let the machine chase the ghost it already expects instead of the one it shouldn’t see.
His fingers move fast, bluffing confidence he doesn’t feel. Each micro-adjustment skirts the line between clever and confessing. Too aggressive, and it will look like manual tampering. Too subtle, and the reconcile thread will finish its crawl, hand a neat, suspicious summary to some bored security analyst with nothing better to do.
Behind his ribs, his heart pounds in counterpoint to the blinking status lights. Dev knows this feeling from tight air budgets and patched leaks on the laborer decks: the moment when a system realizes it’s being lied to and decides to care.
“Come on, come on,” he mutters at the scrolling logs, as if the AI can be hurried, as if the station itself might be persuaded not to notice him.
The purge hits like an axe through a spiderweb, brutal, imprecise, and far too late.
His daemon drops, but the echo of its work keeps moving. The probe pattern he’d designed to be neat and self-contained, a polite little diagnostic knock, is suddenly everywhere it shouldn’t be: woven into lubrication checks, valve latency pings, thermal drift baselines. Each packet carries the same digital nametag he forged weeks ago. SHARMA // EXT‑MNT TEMP. Each one dutifully acknowledged by systems that were never supposed to know that alias existed.
On the manifold overview, soft greens harden to amber. The central AI’s attention, normally diffused across thousands of routine tasks, narrows. A reconciliation thread branches and then branches again, correlating event IDs, cross-checking who “Sharma” is supposed to be, which doors he’s badged, which consoles he’s ever touched. Old spoofed tickets he’d written on graveyard shifts, little white lies to access a sealed log here, a valve schematic there, light up in chronological sequence, like someone tracing his footsteps backwards through time.
He feels the danger shift from “maybe no one will notice” to “the system has started asking questions with his name in them.”
The filaments don’t know they’re under threat; Kavitesh, bent over the sample cassette in his insulated harness, certainly doesn’t. From Vaidisha’s vantage, his heat-signature is a pale blot just inside the gantry’s maintenance lip, directly in the projected wash cone. One misfire, one sloppy pilot correction, and he’ll be in the wrong place at the worst possible second.
Her jaw tightens. Manoj isn’t sloppy.
He’s early.
Her HUD tags the tug’s stated manifest, water, polymer feedstock, surplus rations, and overlays an older incident brief: “possible association with unmanifested cargo.” She flicks it away before the flag can auto-propagate to the shared security board. If she pushes this up the chain, central will either wave it through or swoop in, neither option keeping Kavitesh, or the refugees two corridors over, out of the blast radius.
She reruns the vector sim, then a manual back‑of‑pad check, praying for a rounding error. The burn cone still scythes straight through the brightest live strands. Approve, and she signs off on corporate-sanctioned vandalism; deny, and she invites scrutiny into why a low-priority berth suddenly matters. Slapping a “biohazard” seal would scream that security already knows there’s something worth guarding here: an invitation to smugglers, zealots, and nervous administrators alike.
She opts for asymmetry. A “dust‑off recalibration” notice, low‑priority and boring, pings Manoj’s console from a dummy supervisor profile she shouldn’t have. Simultaneously she files a corrupted‑sensor ticket on the manifold, reclassifying the anomaly as a known glitch pattern she remembers from an old training sim. Neither fix is clean. Both buy minutes. She spends them, silently, on Kavitesh.
Improvisation required Working from memory instead of sanctioned tools, Dev hand‑codes a crude diversion: he reassigns the most volatile telemetry channels to a sandbox loop on the tablet, spoofing timestamp and origin tags so the rogue data looks like harmless calibration chatter. The move buys him a few precious cycles of ambiguity (central logs show noise in a noncritical test harness instead of a live manifold glitch) but it also means any misstep routes real pressure warnings straight into his jury‑rigged buffer with no automatic safeties between him and a cascading fault.
His thumbs flick across the cracked screen, nails bitten short, cursor hopping through raw hex and half‑remembered interface calls. There’s no autocomplete here, no corporate UI smoothing the edges; just an old diagnostics shell that still lists systems by the names the first‑generation installers scrawled in Hindi shorthand. He mutters under his breath, matching those scraps to the neat, sanitized labels he sees during official shifts.
The rogue spikes keep coming, thin and regular as a heartbeat. He tags them with a fake test ID, VT_CALIB_GANTRY‑B, and injects a delay, just enough that any automated triage routine will push them down the queue. A red pressure flag flares on his side of the loop; he swears, re‑routes it manually to the station’s archival buffer, the place where orphaned alerts go to die under “historical trend analysis.”
“Chal, chal, bas…” he whispers, more to the manifold than to himself.
For a second the oscillation graph smooths, flattening into something that looks like a technician bumping a sensor rack. Enough to fool an overworked supervisor skimming dashboards. Maybe enough to fool security’s anomaly filters too, if they’re tuned to corporate specs and not to what actually happens in laborer decks.
His ring‑finger hovers over the send‑commit sequence. If he’s mis‑mapped even one address, the sandbox will bleed into a live control bus and the whole manifold will light up like a Diwali string. He pictures refugees in Sharanam getting emergency cutoffs first, colonist docks next, corporate cores last.
He commits anyway, feeling the tablet’s casing vibrate faintly as new traffic floods in, a makeshift dam wedged into the river of the station’s breath.
Improvisation required Knowing he can’t juggle this alone, Dev fires off a single, carefully weighted message to the one corporate scientist he half‑trusts. The text to Kavitesh is nothing but: “Ganesha mask on.” It’s the phrase they agreed on in a hushed corridor weeks ago, a polite fiction about “field redundancies” that really means: drop out of the monitored grid, assume hostile scrutiny on all active emissions, and act as if any anomaly you see is both important and compromised.
On the Vaishnavi ring, Kavitesh’s wristband buzzes once, discreetly. No priority chime, no AR banner: just the bare text sliding into a low‑trust channel he and Dev buried inside equipment‑maintenance chatter. His first instinct is to glance up at the nearest ceiling lens; his second is to lower his eyes and keep his expression bland, as if he’s just received another reagent inventory nudge.
“Mask on,” he murmurs, almost like a mantra.
He palms his AR visor to opaque, killing its external uplink with a practiced thumb‑press, and flips his portable sensors into dumb‑log mode: no live telemetry, no auto‑upload, everything cached local. On his console, experiment dashboards continue streaming sanitized data to corporate archives. In his hand, the real instruments go quiet and watch.
Improvisation required In his lab on Vaishnavi, Kavitesh receives the alert, feels his stomach tighten, and complies without asking for context. One by one he flips his portable samplers and drones from networked telemetry to sealed, local logging, watching their green “uplink” icons wink to amber isolation. On a side console he quietly kills nonessential data feeds that might betray which hull sectors interest him most, leaving only a bland, generic status stream visible to corporate monitors while his real observations go dark behind encrypted buffers.
He adds one more layer: a routine maintenance script that slowly desynchronizes local timestamps by a few milliseconds, muddying any later forensic correlation. “Vighnaharta, clear the path,” he breathes, disguising prayer as a tired sigh, then walks toward the nearest secure sample vault as if nothing at all has changed.
Improvisation required In his Vaishnavi lab, Kavitesh feels his stomach knot at Dev’s signal but moves without hesitation. One by one he flips portable samplers and crawlers from networked telemetry to sealed local logs, watching green uplink glyphs fade to amber isolation. On a side console he quietly kills nonessential feeds that highlight certain hull sectors, leaving a bland, uniform status stream for corporate eyes while his true observations slide into encrypted, air‑gapped buffers. Then he schedules a fake recalibration routine so any later timing discrepancies look like nothing more than routine maintenance lag.
Improvisation required Out at Raghukul, Manoj’s console chirps with a priority burst from Raghuveeran: a terse vector change and a single line.
As Manoj trims thrust and lets the tug fall into its forbidden vector, micro-adjusting around a customs beacon with casual, fingertip precision, the rest of the station shivers.
Deep in Sharanam, the inner ring feels it first as a strange, syncopated sigh through the bulkheads. A fractional shift in manifold pressure ripples through the annex’s overworked pipes, translating into a hiccup in the airflow: one breath that comes out thin and metallic before the recycling algorithms compensate. It’s nothing on a schematic, a blip that wouldn’t even register on most corporate dashboards. But here, where everyone has learned to read the air like scripture, it’s confirmation.
The old woman stirring dal over an induction coil pauses, nostrils flaring. The boy chasing a drifting toy car grabs for a handhold as the faintest lag in circulation brushes his cheek. Conversations chop off mid-sentence as if someone has hit mute. Heads tilt toward ceiling grilles and exposed conduits. A murmur runs along the corridor: “Did you feel that?” “Lines again.” “They tagged it, I told you. Security is playing with the flow.”
Stories that had been only whispers solidify in a heartbeat. “They’re putting markers in our water.” “They want a reason to clear us out.” “Colonist ships come close, our luck disappears.” Someone’s cousin saw a glowing film on the tap. Someone else heard about sealed doors near the manifold, “quarantine,” the ugliest word on the station.
People peel away from cooking fires and prayer clusters, leaving half-finished chapatis on hotplates, incense still smoking in shared shrines. They drift and shove toward the primary gate, a slow, thickening migration shaped more by shared dread than by any shouted order. In Sharanam’s low, uneven grav, the corridor becomes a three-dimensional press of bodies and belongings (filter canisters, jerry-rigged water testers, patched rations jugs) coalescing into a single, anxious organism moving toward the only visible point of control.
By the time station chronometers tick another minute, the annex’s quiet access conduit has been swallowed by a restless, tightening crowd.
Vaidisha arrives at the Annex access node a breath too late for subtlety, met not by the quiet conduit she’d planned to take but by a wall of bodies pressed against the checkpoint: worried grandparents clutching filter canisters, teenagers with improvised placards cut from ration crates, and younger children tethered by cloth loops to their elders. Condensation beads glisten on the canisters like sweat. The hand-scrawled slogans (DON’T TAG OUR WATER, WE ARE NOT WASTE) bump against her chest as the crowd sways.
She slows, pulse ticking up. One practiced motion hides the embossed security insignia under her collar; another adjusts her stance, prosthetic foot magnetized to the deck to ride the buffeting. In this light, in this borrowed refugee jumpsuit, she can almost pass as one of them. Until someone looks too closely.
She angles to slide along the corridor’s edge, head down, but a father with a water-scarred ration jug tracks the unnatural set of her armor plates, the standard-issue cut of her vest, the holster at her hip. His gaze locks on the service pistol’s dull sheen. Hope flickers there for a second then hardens into fury.
“Security.” The word is half curse, half plea. His hand clamps around her forearm, fingers digging into composite and synth-flesh. The crowd senses the contact like a current; heads turn, conversations snap taut.
“You’re poisoning us or hiding it: what are you doing to our lines?” he shouts, voice cracking against the curved metal. The accusation ricochets down the corridor, louder than the distant hum of failing recyclers.
The single accusation flowers into a ragged chorus before she can twist free. Hands snag at her sleeves, her webbing, the exposed cable runs of her prosthetic. Some pleading, some striking, all of them desperate. In the sloppy low‑grav, every sideways yank threatens to pitch her off-axis; only the hard lock of her prosthetic’s magnets against the bulkhead keeps her from being rolled under the surge. Training drills say: widen your stance, show your empty hands, make yourself smaller than their fear. But her sidearm is already jammed, cold and unforgiving, between her hip and somebody’s ribs, and any motion toward her comm or baton will read as escalation.
She lifts her free hand slowly, fingers spread. “Sunno, listen. If there is contamination, standing here, pressed together, makes you the first targets. Let the air move, haan?” Her voice cuts a brief channel through the din, but it doesn’t give her room. The bodies stack tighter, the corridor narrowing around her until she feels the hard curve of the hatch frame at her spine. She’s effectively locked in place, a single armored vertebra in a panicked organism, pinned in the very choke point she had to keep clear. Unable to advance, unable to retreat, aware that any wrong word could turn this from panic to stampede.
Two decks away, in the coolant manifold spine, Dev rides the same pressure oscillation from the inside. He’s hunched over an improvised sensor tap, watching the xenobiological trace wiggle in patterns that shouldn’t be possible when the flow hiccups harder than any of his simulations predicted. Line pressure spikes, his spoofed buffer throws an angry cascade of errors, and the microsecond lag while he swears and reaches for the probe is all the time the station’s buried fail‑safes need to catch up. A heavy segmented door irises down between him and the marked safe egress, sealing with a bass thud that turns the narrow junction into a cul‑de‑sac of red emergency strobes and thick, cottony silence.
Dev lunges for the manual override on reflex, but a yellow quarantine glyph blossoms across the panel, sealing it as the local claxon cuts mid-wail to a suffocating hush. Only the slow pulse of hazard strobes and a wrong, almost syncopated shiver in the coolant tell him central has tagged his segment as compromised. Any shout on an open channel will drag security eyes straight onto his unauthorized sensors, spoofed buffers, and falsified maintenance ticket. No way back through the bulkhead, no guarantee the next automated step isn’t a purge of “infected” lines. He is alone with a living pattern in the pipes, a dwindling air budget, and the tight, dawning certainty that whatever comes next will arrive before he can extract his data. Or himself.
Kavitesh’s visor pings with the manifold’s quarantine status a heartbeat after Dev’s sector goes silent, overlays stuttering from calm procedural blue to a hard, insistent amber that blooms across his field of view. The neat iconography of routine diagnostics fractures into layered warning banners as central control’s incident header (POTENTIAL CASCADE / COOLANT‑BIOFILM INTERACTION) unfolds at the periphery of his vision, accompanied by the low, thrumming tone reserved for failures that can chain-react across decks.
A five‑minute response countdown snaps into place in the upper-right corner of his AR, numbers already ticking down every decrement a small amputation of options. He expands the incident pane with a twitch of his prosthetic thumb and forefinger, pulling up the automated mitigation tree. Pre‑purge routines have initialized in three adjacent loops: flow‑rate ramp, chemical shock, controlled temperature spike. The manifold schematic resolves in semi‑transparent lines over the actual bulkhead in front of him, a ghost system bleeding orange where pressure is spiking and violet where xenobiological density is inferred rather than measured.
“Initiating biocidal over‑chlorination,” the system intones in the flat, devotional cadence of the corporate ops AI. “Projected sterilization of anomalous biofilms in affected segments: ninety‑three point six percent.”
Ninety‑three point six percent, he thinks, gaze snagging on the patch of piping Dev flagged earlier as showing nonrandom signal structure. And the rest? What mutates, what retreats deeper into microfractures, what they never even get to see?
He flicks through submenus, palms suddenly damp inside his gloves. Manual override privileges: restricted to senior xenobiology and life‑support chiefs. His own credentials are already in use, tagged to the very anomaly report his automated pipeline filed when Dev’s spoofed telemetry buffered through his lab node. To pull that report now, to scrub it or stall it, would leave a trail as bright as a flare in an oxygen‑starved dark.
“Kya kiya tune, Dev,” he murmurs under his breath, more prayer than accusation. Did Dev see the same pattern? Did he intend for this to reach central, or had the oscillation simply tripped buried safeguards that neither of them mapped fully?
His prosthetic fingers flex near‑imperceptibly, haptic feedback from the visor UI tickling along metal and phantom nerves alike. In the heatmap overlay, the xenobiological signatures aren’t scattered noise anymore; they resolve as faint, pulsing nodes along multiple loops, synchronized in a way that feels more like intention than contamination. Lines of coolant and life intertwining.
Four minutes, twelve seconds.
He toggles to Dev’s last known maintenance ticket. The ID pings back as valid, but the route plotted in the schematic doesn’t match the official work order. Dev has cut through a blind spur, an older service crawl that predates the last infrastructure refit. No easy way in or out now that a quarantine gasket has slammed shut. Kavitesh can request visual confirmation, dispatch a drone camera into the segment, but the same request will echo in security’s logs.
Ethics training, corporate edition, whispers at the back of his mind: in a cascade risk, preserve human life first, then structural integrity, then data and experimental subjects. In that order. The incident flowchart scrolling beside his countdown reflects that moral hierarchy rendered as policy, as code. Yet the pre‑purge routines aren’t designed for delicate triage; they are blunt instruments, optimized to protect the whole by burning away anomalies at the margins.
He pinches the feed smaller and calls up a narrowband to Dev’s suit, overriding his own earlier caution about drawing lines between them. Static hisses for a moment, then resolves into the faint hiss of Dev’s breathing overlaid with the background hum of an isolated segment.
“Dev, yahan Kav,” he says softly. “You’re in Q‑zone now. Talk to me.”
No verbal reply: only a spike in ambient noise, as if Dev has shifted too quickly in the cramped junction. Then a clipped whisper: “You see the timer on your side?”
“Haan. Four minutes,” Kavitesh answers. “They’re spinning up a purge.”
“Then you know what happens to my… to your data,” Dev says. There’s a tight, bitter laugh half‑swallowed in the transmission. “And to whatever’s in these lines.”
Kavitesh swallows, feeling the weight of his rudraksha beads against his wrist under the lab cuff, an old comfort translated into magnetic fields and corporate timecodes. Four minutes to choose between letting the system erase a nascent ecology he barely understands: or flagging an exception that might save it but draw every hostile gaze on Dev, on Sharanam, on himself.
The countdown ticks on, indifferent: 3:[^47], 3:[^46], 3:[^45].
The Vaishnavi incident console, running mostly on automation at this hour, flags the anomaly as a cross‑system risk and kicks off an inspection sweep without waiting for human sign‑off. Status windows blossom along the edge of Kavitesh’s vision as the process fans out through subsystems: coolant, life‑support, structural stress monitors, xenobio vault integrity. A rapid‑response diagnostics drone undocks from its cradle in the research ring with insect precision, magnetic clamps releasing in sequence before its maneuvering jets puff it onto a pre‑approved vector. Its route is locked and the icon representing it on his visor is a hard, uncompromising white.
A nearby security patrol, two armor tags and one medical, blinks from leisurely corridor sweep to incident response. Their path replots in real time, bending away from the corporate promenade toward the manifold spine; a terse update packet rides along their assignment line, incident code and minimal context. Kavitesh can open the packet, watch authorization chains and quarantine tiers scroll past, but every field that matters is greyed out. He can see the response taking shape, but he cannot slow it, cannot soften it, cannot call it back.
The manifold answers with motion. On Kavitesh’s overlay, segments of pipe thicken from amber to blood‑red as automated scripts seize control: valves slam in sequence, sending dull shocks through the decking; backup chlorination pumps chatter awake in Dev’s loop, dosing reservoirs primed with a chemical shock meant for dumb slime. Flow vectors replot themselves into jagged, blinking arrows that stab straight through the densest clusters of inferred xenobiology.
“Pre‑purge staging, phase one,” the ops AI recites. “Confirm or escalate.”
Every protective reflex of the station has a second edge. The same surge that will scour the pipes clean will also fry Dev’s unauthorized sensor net, overwrite his spoofed buffers, and stamp a neat, incriminating anomaly in the logs unless he can ghost both data and hardware before the first biocidal wave hits.
In Sharanam, the alert arrives as a mangled burst through buzzing speakers, words drowned in feedback and generator hum. “…possible contamination… remain in place… security en route…” is all that cuts through. “Contamination” and “security” ricochet down the crowded corridors. Within minutes, mutters of “they’ve tagged our water” and “colonist ships are stealing our luck” flare into accusations that corporate is testing poisons on refugees, pulling anxious residents toward the Annex’s main gate just when its approaches most need to stay clear.
In Sargam’s dim free‑float, Savitriya’s wristband blooms with overlapping call glyphs: students from the Annex pushing shaky holos of clustered families, sealed hatches, a security team massing at the far corridor. Anchoring on a handhold, she routes her channel into Sharanam’s public feed and begins: decoding jargon, naming specific side‑passages to clear, threading in slow breathing cues and quiet warnings that frightened crowds justify exactly the crackdown already coiling in security chatters she can’t see but knows by pattern and history.
In Vaishnavi’s lab tier, the same alert takes a different shape.
Kavitesh is still watching the manifold schematic pulse red when a new window blooms, half‑overriding his own overlays. It isn’t the clean, blue‑framed diagnostic he expects. This one carries a jagged amber border and a header he’s never seen outside of old training sims: HISTORICAL CORRELATION FLAG – SUPPRESSED RULESET.
For a second, he thinks Dev’s spoof has misfired something deep in the stack. Then the fine print scrolls:
INCIDENT PROFILE: BIOLOGICAL / CUSTOMS
ASSOCIATED ID: DESHRAJ, RAGHUVEERAN (CAPT.)
SECTOR: COOLANT MANIFOLD R‑27 / HULL GANTRY ADJACENT
STATUS: SECURITY INTEREST REGISTERED NEAR DESIGNATED COORDINATES
The name lands in his chest like a dropped tool.
“Why is a colonist captain in our coolant logs?” he murmurs, more to himself than to the room.
The lab’s ops AI, polite and toneless, answers anyway. “Legacy incident‑correlation routine 38b has identified matching spatial and procedural patterns with prior interdiction attempts involving Subject: Deshraj, Raghuveeran. Human review pending.”
Dev, hunched at the peripheral console, twists around. “Raghuveeran?” His accent thickens around the name. “The same Raghuveeran from the dock rumors?”
“Apparently our pipes are ‘historically relevant’ to him,” Kavitesh says, dry, but his fingers betray him, tightening on the rail. On his visor, iconography shifts: what had been simple flow vectors now bristle with overlay glyphs from Security. Watchlist sigils, contraband markers, a faint red halo around the manifold’s coordinate tag that means someone’s priority just went up.
He suppresses the instinct to swipe the correlation away. If he clears the alert from his view, it doesn’t clear from theirs.
“Security will read this as a smuggling trail,” he thinks. “Not as a living system.”
The prosthetic in his left arm ticks faintly as embedded haptics mirror the lab’s rising alarm codes. Somewhere in Raghukul, a man he’s only seen in briefing photos is now staring at a similar coordinate stamp, drawing very different conclusions.
Between them, in coolant pipes and hull microfractures, the thing they’re both converging on keeps growing, unaware that an old, half‑forgotten rule has just weaponized its coordinates against everyone near it.
Raghuveeran pushes past a hanging veil of cargo nets into a half‑lit niche between fuel drums, the station’s main concourse noise dropping to a muffled thrum. Here, the bulkhead AR is stripped to bare admin layers. He palms his pad flat against the metal, thumb flicking through encrypted overlays until a ghosted wireframe of Prithvi‑Parikrama’s outer trusses blossoms in front of him.
Blue system coordinates cascade down one side; on the other, his own illicit annotations crawl up. Hand‑entered notes, crew slang, tiny tags of “good growth” and “test later.” When the new alert’s sector ID locks onto his private map of hull microhabitats, the overlay snaps to alignment with a harsh chime.
Exact match. Same gantry he’d scouted weeks ago via a bribed maintenance cam, the one he’d quietly marked for a slow, timed harvest window after station‑night, when customs eyes drooped.
“Of course you finally notice this one,” he mutters toward the corporate systems humming behind the wall.
If their dormant routines are pinging his spot now, the window is closing.
He opens the crew channel, voice dropping into the hard register that means no debate.
“Schedule’s burned,” he says. “Forget the polite pass. No customs dance, no pretty alignment with the official arm. We go in dirty, side‑clamp only. EVA team on partial suits and patch tanks, five minutes from latch to pull.”
A pause, then Manoj’s acknowledgment crackles back, edged with reluctant excitement.
“We move now,” Raghuveeran finishes, eyes on the highlighted gantry. “Or we lose it to their quarantine tags and pretty lab cages.”
Manoj is already riding the approach stack when the tug jitters under him, flight holo stuttering as Raghuveeran’s override chews through the filed plan. The clean, green corporate corridor evaporates from his HUD, replaced by a hair‑thin spline that knifes in from the wrong angle, weaving through greyed‑out surveillance cones and maintenance no‑fly tags.
“Arre yaar,” he mutters, fingers dancing anyway. Secondary beacons go dark; he trims the main burn until the tug’s thermal profile sinks into station background, letting inertial drift do most of the work. Auto‑docking safeties squawk as he arms the manual side‑clamps, amber glyphs blooming along his console.
“Flying half‑blind into a bio‑haunted gantry,” he complains to nobody, but his hands stay rock‑steady as he noses the tug toward the unauthorized latch point skirting the glowing hull‑web, watching for the slightest shimmer where sensor returns already lie.
Below deck, Raghuveeran’s selected crew scramble into mismatched EVA rigs: surplus miner shells, patched colonist suits, visors lined with devotional stickers and scratched colony crests. Manoj’s docking update crackles in their ears as they snap tool packs and improvised containment canisters to their belts: recycled fuel drums, retrofitted sample pods. The directive is brutally simple: strip whatever they can from the luminescent growth and be gone before a quarantine curtain drops and security spotters wake. There’s no time for proper assay or decon, only a muttered mantra or curse as they rehearse the route in hasty hand gestures against the bulkhead, trusting Manoj to carve them a narrow window of attachment and retreat through station blind zones.
In Vaishnavi’s half‑forgotten data cores, the manifold alarm doesn’t just queue human responders; it worms into an archival anomaly‑detector slated for decommissioning. Starved of input but still tuned for pattern hunger, the old model latches eagerly onto Dev’s subtly bent life‑support curves, low‑level EM haze bleeding off hull‑growth zones, and hairline deviations in Sharanam’s water metrics. Iteration by iteration, it decides these aren’t stray glitches but facets of a single distributed “network event,” silently bumping the flag from ROUTINE FIELD CHECK to PRIORITY INVESTIGATION and auto‑routing encrypted pings to security, xenobio, and operations. Straight toward the docks where Manoj’s darkened tug drifts in under the cameras’ threshold.
Dev’s dilemma in the darkened manifold
The hatch clamps finish cycling with a hydraulic thud that Dev feels in his teeth. Amber seal‑glyphs bloom along the rim, cascading from LOCAL ISOLATION to REMOTE OVERRIDE PENDING. The manifold lights dim automatically to emergency levels, turning the coolant mist into drifting, luminous veils that bead on his eyelashes and the lenses of his glasses.
He has wedged himself between a coolant line and the maintenance console, one boot braced against the bulkhead. The panel in front of him shows the manifold’s heartbeat in stacked graphs: pressure ripples, micro‑temperature gradients, trace conductivity along the coolant‑lace. What used to look like noise now moves with unnerving grace. Dips in one branch of piping echo as rises in another; fractional second delays match the lag he built into his spoofed telemetry to fool central.
Except something else is dancing with him.
Dev flicks a filter on, stripping out his own injected pattern. The residual trace should be random thermal drift. Instead, phase shifts bloom into a syncopated curve, repeating, then adjusting, as the manifold tries to compensate for the lockdown valves slamming shut. It’s like watching a choir catch the pitch of an off‑key singer and pull it into harmony.
“Tu dekh raha hai, na?” he whispers to the coolant‑fog itself. You are seeing this, right? His voice disappears into the hiss of bypass vents.
The log buffer ticks upward, megabyte by incriminating megabyte. Every datapoint carries his forged access token, his unauthorized sampling hooks, his name. In Vaishnavi Ring they will see a laborer‑class tech splicing unauthorized scripts into critical life‑support, and no one will care that the same curves prove coordinated behavior across decks.
His thumb hovers over PURGE LOCAL ARCHIVE. One press, and the manifold rolls back to factory defaults; his scripts vanish, the elegant pattern smears into plausible deniability. He walks out a tired, overworked tech who panicked during a lockdown. The “organism” reverts to a rumor in his head and a few hand‑drawn charts hidden under his bunk.
He imagines, instead, leaving the logs live. Security’s remote audit hits, red‑flags his signature, and a neat incident report spools out: UNAUTHORIZED MODIFICATION, POTENTIAL SABOTAGE. They’ll ice him in some holding cell, strip his gear, lock this manifold under a biohazard protocol written by people who have never sweated in these corridors. The coolant‑lace, the hull‑filaments, whatever is humming through the station’s bones: flattened in the files under CONTAMINANT REMOVAL COMPLETE.
“Saboot ke bina kaun sunega?” Who will listen without proof? The workers coughing under flickering vents? Refugees whose complaints vanish into ticket queues? Corporate xenobio? He has read Kavitesh Rao’s sanitized summaries, the careful language about “uncharacterized biofilms” and “preliminary concern.” If Rao saw these curves, would he recognize the pattern? Would he fight his own employers to protect it?
A new status line crawls across the top of his console: REMOTE DIAGNOSTIC CHANNEL REQUESTED – SECURITY / OPERATIONS. A thirty‑second countdown starts.
Dev’s heart kicks. Even purging now might not be fast enough; the anomaly‑detector upstream could already have mirrored part of the buffer. But leaving everything as is is suicide. His hand jerks toward the purge, then stalls, muscle locked.
What if this is the only moment anyone ever has a clean view of the organism’s network? The manifold isolation has cut most background traffic, turning the faint, distributed murmur into a clear, sharp signal. If he erases it, the organism will adapt, routes will shift, and the next curious tech won’t know what to look for. If he preserves it, locked behind his own doomed credentials, someone might reconstruct the truth from the wreckage of his career.
Twenty seconds.
He forces a breath past tight lungs, the air thick with antifreeze tang. A compromise edges into focus, messy and dangerous. He can’t stop the security audit, but he might be able to bend its first impression.
“Chal, ek last jugad,” he mutters.
Instead of stabbing PURGE, he launches a compressed mirror of the live graphs onto a dead maintenance address he found months ago: a forgotten buffer on an out‑of‑service pump node that only routes to low‑priority technical archives. It’s not clean, not safe, but it’s someplace security won’t scan first. If he ever gets out, if he can reach someone like Rao or Savitriya’s teaching feeds, he can point them there.
Fifteen seconds.
Now his thumb slams down on purge. Local logs flood with zeroes as the manifold AI scrubs unauthorized traces, overwriting his scripts with vanilla configs. The elegant phase curves vanish from the main display, replaced by jittery, “acceptable” noise.
The countdown hits three. The console pings: REMOTE DIAGNOSTIC CHANNEL ACCEPTED.
Dev wipes his glasses with the edge of his sleeve, smearing coolant across the frames. He plants a neutral expression on his face, the one he uses when supervisors wander through: tired, deferential, empty of opinion. Somewhere in the station’s forgotten plumbing, a hidden packet of truth spins in digital dark, waiting for someone more powerful, or more foolish, than a dock‑born tech to notice it.
If security buys the reset, they will see what they expect: a glitch, a nervous worker, nothing else. If they don’t, the hatch will cycle again under armed escort.
Either way, the manifold hums softly around him, pressure waves ticking in time with a rhythm he can no longer see.
At Sharanam’s main gate, the rumor‑stoked crowd swells around Vaidisha until her armor plates are just another hard surface in a crush of angry, frightened bodies. Small fingers snag on the seams of her gauntlet; someone’s elbow jams into the joint of her prosthetic thigh. Voices stack into a jagged chorus, “You’re tagging our water, na?” “First colonies, now us?”, half questions, half verdicts. A woman shoves a cloudy bottle up toward Vaidisha’s chest plate. “My child drank this. You tell me if it’s poison.”
Her visor feed scrolls with crisp injunctions: CLEAR ACCESS FOR RESPONSE TEAM. MAINTAIN ORDER. USE MINIMUM FORCE. Overlayed on that, her encrypted side channel flickers with route projections, showing the incoming squad’s path slicing straight through prayer circles and improvised crèches, past the alcove where her aunt still leaves marigolds when she can afford them.
If she drives the crowd back with riot‑drill precision, she becomes the corporate blade at her own people’s throat. If she delays, if she keeps them clustered and loud, she risks a reprimand, reassignment to some distant cargo choke point, and the quiet erasure of the one refugee in uniform who still argues against blanket quarantines.
“Sunno, zara side ho jao,” she calls, voice amplified but stripped of command bark, hands open and low. “Gate khula rehna zaroori hai. Agar lock lag gaya na, phir koi andar‑bahar nahi jaa payega.”
A man near the front spits on the deck between her boots. “Already locked, behen. Just pretending we still have a choice.”
Her prosthetic foot magnetizes a little harder to the deck as a surge presses her backward; for a heartbeat she feels the old panic of sealed compartments and no lifeboats. She kills the instinct to shove, to carve space with elbow and baton. Instead she twists, bracing sideways, making herself a buffer between the densest knot of bodies and the gate sensors.
Her HUD pulses: RESPONSE TEAM TWO MINUTES OUT. STAND BY TO HAND OVER PERIMETER.
Two minutes to decide whether she delivers her own people into a corridor of guns and scanners. Or engineers just enough confusion that the team has to divert, buying time for the rumors to cool and for someone like Kavitesh to confirm what’s really in their pipes.
“Listen to me,” she says, forcing her voice to cut through the roar without riding it. “Agar main yahan se hatti hoon, dus log aur aayenge. Unke liye tum sirf ‘threat’ ho. Mere liye tum ghar ke log ho. Let me keep this line thin, samjhe? Nahi toh woh log sab ko ek saath dhakel denge.”
A teenager with a torn school badge glares up at her. “Then use your badge for us. Lock them out.”
Her hand twitches toward the manual gate controls, then stops. To hard‑seal Sharanam against a security response would be open defiance, maybe mutiny. It would also hand corporate exactly the narrative they want: refugees as non‑compliant biohazards.
Between oaths sworn under corporate lighting and promises whispered to sleeping cousins in these very corridors, there is no clean path. Only a narrow, shifting ledge where she can stand, absorbing weight from both sides, hoping that for this alarm, at least, the station’s hungry systems will misread hesitation as control.
Outside Raghukul’s cluttered arms, Manoj’s tug drifts with cabin lights bled to ember and the board whispering forged maintenance credentials, nose angling toward the little‑used gantry where the hull‑growth clings like hoarfrost around an old scar in the plating. On his HUD, guidance glyphs smear and double; the filaments throw back ragged phantom silhouettes of the station, fuzzing range gates, swallowing clean edges. New patrol vectors bloom in red from Vaishnavi’s band, overlapping the pale cone that marks his intended approach. Raghuveeran’s voice cuts in over the channel tight with urgency.
Manoj noses the tug into a familiar pocket of interference, engines breathing in half‑second pulses. Every twitch of his fingers is a bet: bleed off velocity, shape a softer docking plume that won’t blister the living film and maybe won’t spike security’s anomaly filters… or punch the thrusters harder, accept scorch and hull‑quake, and trust that speed plus sensor noise will let them rip a few core samples free before anyone in uniform can even triangulate his burn signature.
His palms are slick inside his gloves. Outside, the frost‑like web shivers in station wake, flexing minutely, as if it, too, is trying to decide whether to hide or meet him head‑on.
In the borrowed grav‑wobbling bay, the air tastes of coolant and incense from some forgotten shrine. Raghuveeran’s jaw works as fresh red sigils bloom: SECURITY DISPATCH, XENOBIO LOCKDOWN PROTOCOL – PREP. What was supposed to be corporate blindness has become a shared horizon; his “distraction” is now their spotlight. He stabs new vectors into the schematic, drawing a narrow, crooked corridor around official patrol cones and predicted sample‑collection sweeps. Manoj will have to skim the growth raw, no staged containment, no proper decon: crew handling live filaments in patched suits and prayer. The under‑logged airlock Dev mentioned becomes their only exit, a rumor promoted to lifeline. Raghuveeran knows it may already be on some junior officer’s anomaly list, but delay means losing exclusivity to corporate freezers. Worse, his improvised exfil route now threads directly through the same blind maintenance doglegs that, according to Kavitesh’s scattered messages, might be used to spirit Dev and any “legitimate” samples away. One wrong minute, one nervous guard, and his smugglers, the xenobiologists, and the organism itself will collide in a space never meant to hold so many competing futures.
The organism’s influence slips in through dashboards and ducts: Dev’s buffers fill only when he hesitates; Manoj’s clean trajectories warp just where the filaments are thickest; Vaidisha’s crowd surges in sync with micro‑pressure shifts in Sharanam’s lines. To Kavitesh it may look less like coincidence than a distributed, station‑wide act of negotiation.
Patterns snapping into alignment
On Kavitesh’s wall, the station unfurled as layers of ghost‑light: airflow vectors, heat blooms, filtration load, EM chatter. At first it was the same migraine smear he’d been staring at for days. Then Dev’s illicit telemetry bled in from the side channel, tagged in angry red by the Vaishnavi monitoring AI.
Lines straightened.
He flicked his prosthetic fingers and the manifold lock’s spike in Dev’s sector rose as a jagged crest. He added Manoj’s blind approach route, scraped from customs residue logs and a half‑legal query Vaidisha would flay him for. Along that vector, sensor fidelity dipped. Not a lot, not enough to trip automated alerts, but rhythmically. He overlaid pressure traces from Sharanam’s overtaxed air ducts, their tiny, off‑beat stutters like skipped heartbeats. Lastly, he dropped in the faint EM phase‑shift hugging the Vaishnavi conduits just outside his lab.
For a second the models fought, data pushing and buckling. Then they clicked.
What had been four messy heatmaps folded into a single wave pattern circling the station. Every time an official sweep passed near a known growth site: hull‑filaments on Manoj’s vector, coolant lace in Dev’s manifold, darkening biofilm over refugee showers, whisper‑thin tendrils kissing corporate power lines: the environmental streams flexed. Air rerouted by fractional Pascals, current phase‑shifted by imperceptible degrees, particulate counters went decorrelated. Around each node, readings smeared just long enough to hide local anomalies.
“Yeh… naach raha hai,” he whispered. It’s dancing.
The phrase felt wrong the instant he said it; this wasn’t random motion, it was step‑wise, anticipatory. When he dragged in archived patrol timetables, the bloom tightened. Peaks in sensor distortion preceded sweeps by seconds. Not reacting. Forecasting.
He thought of earlier lab notes: “possible chemotaxis,” “adaptive film growth,” the careful, corporate‑safe language. On the model, those old assumptions burned away. The “contaminations” were no longer scattered infections. They were pulses in a single, distributed body, curling itself out of sight whenever the station looked too closely.
A network, he realized, not just of cells but of intentions. Threaded through decks he barely understood, paying more attention to human schedules than any human ever did.
Dev’s logs as missing pieces
Dev came through on a narrow, hissing channel, backdrop full of overlapping alarms and shouted orders. For a moment all Kavitesh saw was his face (pale, eyes too bright) then the data flood hit.
“Sab bhej raha hoon,” Dev panted. “Jo bhi chhupaya tha. Bas… sambhaal lena.”
Hidden directories unfolded in Kavitesh’s buffer: coolant manifold snapshots, filter swabs, handwritten notes disguised as calibration comments. The upload was sloppy, timestamps smeared by packet loss, but the raw entries slotted into the model like dropped pins.
He stripped out Dev’s “corrections”: maintenance flags mis‑dated by thirty seconds, sensor faults quietly reclassified as “nuisance noise,” minor pressure irregularities attributed to “worker activity.” On the wall, each human lie brightened as a data‑true.
Every time Dev had nudged a reading sideways to keep inspectors off his coworkers’ backs, the organism had already pushed in the same direction: sliding heat, particulates, and flow just past automatic concern thresholds. Dev’s edits didn’t create the blind spots; they sharpened them.
“Arre, yeh toh…” Dev’s voice trailed as he watched the synchronization render, his own redacted entries pulsing in phase with the alien’s distortions.
“You’ve been masking it,” Kavitesh said softly. “Aur yeh tumhe mask kar raha tha. One body, two hands: without either of you knowing.”
The lock timer on Dev’s manifold ticked down in the corner of Kavitesh’s vision, red edging toward black, while he dived into finer scales. Voxel by voxel, the overlays resolved fingers.
Near Sharanam, filaments didn’t just bloat: they braided around vents, pulsing in time with pressure waves from giant pots and steam‑lines. Humidity spikes became deliberate clouds, beads of condensate forming matte curtains exactly along lidar paths, then vanishing once patrol windows passed.
Out on Manoj’s hull vector, the filament mats brightened at every docking kiss, taking that mechanical jolt and spitting it back as a fizz of broadband static. External scanners hit a wall of snow at the precise microsecond they swept those coordinates.
By Vaishnavi, the tendrils were practically listening. Tuning themselves to the 50‑Hz thrum until their own bioelectric oscillations rode just off‑beat, a ghost frequency fault‑filters threw away as background. Breath, heat, current: not waste, but instruments.
He doesn’t narrate; he just lets the image hang while channels go quiet. Routes they’d all called “intuition” reappear as colored paths of prior shelter: Manoj’s side‑jobs, Vaidisha’s refugee sweeps where cameras always “froze,” even Kavitesh’s own unauthorized hull surveys that somehow escaped audit. The pattern carries an accusation. That it has been choosing its people as carefully as its hiding places.
The channel fills with thin, uneven breathing; even Raghuveeran goes quiet. Infestation is the wrong word for a presence that times its edits to committee rotations and maintenance shift changes, that learns which signatures trigger audits and steps neatly around them. It isn’t just hiding: it’s curating who gets caught, who passes, who happens to “discover” what, and when.
He forces himself to keep scrolling.
Every flag he’d once filed under human mess slides, one by one, into the overlay. The manifold lock, its timer bleeding down. Sharanam’s “resolved” moisture alarms. A string of minor biohazard pings in laborer decks that had quietly aged out of the queue.
He throws Manoj’s route on top of it all. The infamous run where the pilot bragged about skating clean through a triple-sweep window. On Kavitesh’s visor, that corridor lights up not as a gap in the net but as a sculpted tunnel of interference: side‑panel biofilms blooming just enough RF snow to fuzz each camera for exactly three frames as Manoj’s tug drifted past.
“It, yaar, it knew patrol timing?” Dev’s voice is small in his ear.
“Not knew,” Kavitesh says, throat dry. “Learned.”
He tags Dev’s own history: coolant-line anomalies that should have bumped into higher priority but didn’t. In each case, the adjacent ductwork shows a thin smear of growth, tuned to throw a little extra CO₂ spike into a completely different sector’s sensors. Just enough to nudge the automated triage elsewhere. Dev wasn’t ignored because the system was indifferent; he was sidelined because something else was driving the attention economy.
“Refugee annex, three weeks ago,” Vaidisha cuts in, more clipped than usual. “Air recycler flagged unknown organic load. Auto-downgraded before my team even saw it.”
He drags up the log. There it is: a neat little cusp on the organism’s expansion curve, right as it colonized a tight bend in Sharanam’s water reclamation. At the same second, along an entirely different manifold in a corporate food-prep zone, a phantom glitch blooms and pops: the kind that spawns a flood of nuisance tickets.
“Decoy,” he says. “It threw a stone in our other hand so we’d drop this one.”
On his display, missed chances accumulate like sins. Each “lucky break,” each bureaucratic absurdity, each time someone like Dev muttered about negligence and turned back to work: they all sit on the same set of slope lines, climbing in tandem with biomass density.
“It’s not just using us to move around,” he says quietly. “It’s been editing what we can see. Picking which of us gets through the cracks. And which cracks we even notice.”
Savitriya names the experiment.
She doesn’t raise her voice; she just reaches past him, calling up a translucent lattice of logs and growth maps between them. With practiced flicks she drags incident codes onto biomass curves, annotating them like she would for a first-year seminar. Red for decoys blooming in low-density slime along noncritical ducts. Amber for false contamination flags in already-sanitized food-prep vents. Cool, unmarked blues where the real hotspots lie: those same zones corporate software proudly labels as “stable” and “within norms.”
“Look at the sequence,” she murmurs. “Alert… alert… reassurance. Like prompts.”
She traces one arc with a fingertip. A minor moisture alarm at Sharanam, auto‑downgraded. A phantom CO₂ spike in a corporate galley, escalated and swarmed. On her overlay, the organism’s growth pulse crests exactly where the system reports calm.
“To me this reads like a controlled trial,” she says. “You vary one stimulus at a time, observe the response.”
Her eyes stay on the data, not on them. “When I make the humans see danger here, how do they move? When I make them see nothing there, what do they ignore? It’s not just learning our systems. It’s running a behavioural study: on us.”
Dev flicks through his backlog with jerky, sleep‑starved motions, jaw tight enough to ache. Tickets he remembers fighting for (coolant turbidity spikes, unexplained biofilm sheens, worker cough clusters) reassemble themselves on the shared overlay, not as evidence of corporate contempt but as a heatmap of someone else’s triage.
“Yeh sab…” he mutters, swallowing. “It was choosing for us.”
Downgrades he’d spat at as class bias all cluster around pale, early smears of growth in noncritical loops: expendable probes. The dense, rope‑like lattices in trunk lines and hull seams? Those sit beneath immaculate logs, a manicured lawn of green status icons and auto‑generated reassurances.
The realization lands with a physical jolt: whatever this thing is, it has been ghost‑writing which crises the station admits are real.
From contamination to co-author On the shared holo, the story of the station rewrites itself. What he’d once logged as contamination curves now read like edits in a living manuscript: patches of noise introduced here, commas of calm inserted there, whole paragraphs of crisis quietly excised. It isn’t merely avoiding quarantine; it’s drafting a version of reality in which its own expansion is footnoted out of existence.
Dev’s laugh comes out hoarse. “Toh phir hum kya hain, madari ke bandar ya co‑authors?” he asks. Savitriya answers that intent is secondary to effect: the network already edits which truths surface and which dissolve. Ignore that and they remain puppets of its redirections; name it and they can bargain. In that crack of possibility, Raghuveeran’s eyes narrow, assembling a counter‑myth in which smugglers, refugees, corporation (and alien) become co‑conspirators in a new balance of terror.
The first sign is a hiccup in the manifold alarms: a three‑second stutter in the shrill tone, as if the station forgets how to scream. Status glyphs on Kavitesh’s visor judder, smear into static, then repaint in a new geometry. Network routes he knows by heart, clean, radial flows from Vaishnavi’s cores out through laborer decks and docks, fracture and re‑stitch themselves in real time. Alert flags hop from pristine corporate trunks to half‑forgotten worker subnets, then blink out altogether wherever xenobiological mass is densest.
“Arre, what are you doing,” he whispers. Not to the station, but to the thing laced through it.
His console scrolls a rapid cascade of “signal attenuation” and “routing exception” notices, but the pattern underneath is too deliberate. Camera feeds that normally bounce through corporate mirrors suddenly detour through maintenance nodes Dev once flagged as “noisy.” Health pings from Sharanam’s overworked air scrubbers reroute through a coolant diagnostics cluster that shouldn’t even be on this subnet.
In Sharanam, residents feel the change as a physical flinch: the string lights running along the corridors dim to a dusky amber, flicker in a ragged wave, then surge back brighter than before. A few children squeal; someone mutters a quick prayer. The kitchen steam-vents cough once, then steady. No one sees the microfilaments tightening around their cable housings, but several personal slates quietly drop off the mesh for exactly three seconds before rejoining with a new default gateway.
In the Raghukul docks, cargo‑readers along a busy arm flash red, then green, then dead. For a heartbeat and a half, half the tagged crates vanish from local manifests. Harried stevedores slap the readers, curse customs, and then relax as the numbers repopulate. As if nothing moved. None of them notice that the missing interval lines up perfectly with the moment Manoj’s cutting team tests their first arc across a hull‑filament cluster.
On Kavitesh’s overlay, it looks like respiration: subsystems contracting around alien mass, then expanding over it, drawing routes away from surveillance like blood shunting from skin to core. It is as if the station has inhaled, the growths riding the breath, and in that breath it has decided what will be seen and what will simply not exist in the official record.
Vaidisha pounds down the corridor with the sweep team fanning out behind her, boots ringing against deck‑plates. Mid‑stride, her tactical HUD blooms with absences. Whole squares of the standard camera grid gray out in tight little archipelagos along the very conduits she’s been ordered to secure. Motion detectors overlay a placid blue, “no activity”, over passages she’s personally cleared a dozen times, always choked with stevedores, kids, and leaking cargo.
“Control, this is Kumari, your feeds are. A side‑pane status note ghosts into being: XENOBIO ANOMALY UNDER REVIEW. Before she can tag it, the text pixelates and collapses into a friendly yellow “TELEMETRY FAULT” icon pulsing reassurance.
Protocol says hard reset, full sensor purge, manual sweep with guns up. She feels her prosthetic leg auto‑stabilize for the turn toward the nearest panel: and stops. Kavitesh’s voice from their last argument threads through the adrenaline: If it can reroute around you, it can reroute for you.
Someone, or something, is choosing who appears on her grid. Her hand hovers over the reset command, and she does the most dangerous thing in security work.
She hesitates.
In the manifold chamber itself, Manoj feels his skin prickle as tool diagnostics desync from their own readouts: cutters report one level of resistance, his prosthetic torque‑dampeners another. The hull‑filaments they’ve started to slice around respond like tensed muscle, not passive growth, subtly redistributing strain so that any deep cut would trigger a pressure alarm three decks away instead of here. He watches a stress map on his wrist‑slate reflow in real time, bright danger bands migrating down an entirely different conduit.
His pilot’s mind recognizes the move: the kind of load‑balancing reroute you pull in a ship that doesn’t want to be caught dumping heat. Only this “ship” is the station’s skin, and it has opinions.
“Bas, bas,” he murmurs to his team, easing his blade back, suddenly unsure who he’s threatening. Corporate sensors, Raghuveeran’s op, or something that has just warned him, very gently, not to cut.
In a cramped auxiliary bay, Dev watches life‑support schematics mutate into designs he’s never seen: biofilm signatures in worker ducts and refugee vents thicken in synchrony, then thin along every path that would expose humans to automated quarantine scans. He slaps his own stolen telemetry over the feed and swears softly. Wherever patrol routes cross heavy growth, sensor clarity degrades just enough to demote bodies to thermal clutter. The network isn’t merely hiding itself; it’s sculpting drifting pockets of sanctioned ignorance, sliding around labor shifts and family clusters like improvised, living safe corridors. For the first time, he feels less like a mechanic tracing leaks and more like a stowaway being deliberately smuggled through his own station.
In Sargam’s free-float hub, Savitriya pauses mid-lesson as the ambient grav-comp hum wavers and stabilizes, and a low ping from her civic-alert band announces an “ongoing security sweep: cooperate with instructions.” She pulls up a public map and notes, with a teacher’s practiced eye, how the designated “secure” pathways curve neatly away from where her more vulnerable students live and work, Sharanam, lower Raghukul arms, maintenance spines near the manifold. In their place, shadowed arcs of unmonitored transit blossom along xenobiology-rich hull trusses and coolant lines, exactly overlapping stories she’s heard in class about “lucky” blind corners and strangely forgiving patrols. She realizes, with a chill of awe, that the emergent ecosystem has chosen its first overt tactic in station politics: mutual concealment as the price of coexistence, a living curriculum of solidarity written directly into the routes people take to survive.
On his console, the second stream does something no certified protocol should. Instead of following the shortest-authority path to corporate data cores, it kinks sideways into a maintenance relay that should have been decommissioned cycles ago, then vanishes into a dead address space that only exists on legacy schematics.
“Yeh kya…” Kavitesh breathes, fingers dancing over filters. The visualizer blooms into a three‑dimensional lattice of paths: one neat, regulated branch carrying Raghuveeran’s burst toward standard decrypt queues, and another fungal, baroque spread burrowing into subnets that border coolant telemetry, hull‑strain monitors, and, disturbingly, the health pings of Sharanam’s reclamation units.
The “living” branch does not move at speed of pure code. Each hop introduces a tiny, consistent delay, twelve milliseconds here, twelve there, stacking into a rhythm that beats in lockstep with the micro‑oscillation he’s already catalogued from the manifold biofilm. To any corporate intrusion scan it would look like degraded copper or thermal noise. To him, watching packet arrival times charted against xenobiological metabolic cycles, it looks like breath.
He shifts perspective, overlays Dev’s stolen duct‑sensor maps. The detour points cluster along exactly those conduits where Dev had flagged anomalous growth: hairline fractures with unexpected tensile reinforcement, condensation traps blooming with iridescent mats. On a hunch, he tags the message ID with a ghost alert and runs a predictive trace. The projected future hops arc out toward a single, innocuous endpoint: an unlicensed maintenance beacon in a laborer corridor, one Dev had once jokingly labeled “Dev‑diary” in a metadata leak.
The organism is not just caching the signal in its own tissues. It is steering it, step by deliberate step, through its densest nodes and then toward a human‑made device that corporate catalogues barely acknowledge. As if, having intercepted this act of human duplicity, it has decided on a witness of its own choosing.
The copy that dives into the dead relay doesn’t simply vanish; it lingers, looping itself through a circuit of living choke‑points. Each reroute hugs a segment of pipe or hull scar he and Dev have tagged before: a coolant elbow overgrown with iridescent lace, a spray‑foam patch now cross‑hatched with calcified veins, a ventilation splice near Sharanam where harmless mold “should” be. On the monitor, the path resolves as a slow, spiraling helix of hops instead of a clean vector.
Latency graphs, usually a blur of stochastic jitter, become a staircase. Fourteen milliseconds, fourteen, fourteen. Then a deliberate pause, like a held breath, before the next node. The payload’s checksum remains nominal, but the headers flex, expand, and contract as though something is pressing against them from the other side of the protocol stack. In between hops, he catches microbursts of diagnostic traffic that no human programmer wrote: malformed queries pinging for field labels, then suppressing themselves in the same twelve‑millisecond beat that defines the manifold’s metabolic oscillation.
It isn’t just hiding the data in its own shadow. It’s tasting it, field by field, before deciding where to send it next.
As Kavitesh drills into the buffered stream, the payload begins to shear away from the copy he cached of Raghuveeran’s original. References to “expendable” refugee corridors fuzz into soft corruption: flipped bits that resolve as harmless routing boilerplate, stray padding bytes, nothing you could hang intent on. Phrases about “leverage over lower‑deck tech assets” persist for a few refreshes, then quietly rot into checksum anomalies that any audit daemon will auto‑sanitize as transmission noise. By contrast, the segments naming Dev’s backdoor routes and Sharanam’s hatch coordinates don’t corrupt; they collapse, excised so cleanly that protocol analyzers register continuous sequence numbers, as if those fields never existed. What remains pristine are tables of xenobiological density indices and access‑control hierarchies, unblurred, almost highlighted in their clarity. The organism, he realizes with a creeping chill, is classifying: preserving what describes its own spread and the station’s skeleton, erasing what points to particular, vulnerable people.
When the reconstituted packet surfaces at the forgotten maintenance beacon Dev once rigged as a private log sink, it carries metadata strata Kavitesh knows Raghuveeran never wrote. Route tags now foreground overlaps between proposed harvest zones and life‑support chokepoints; appended time‑series, from Dev’s coolant telemetry, anonymized emergency work orders, and even Sharanam’s biohazard complaints, compose a dossier of repeated corporate deferrals and concealed near‑failures. The payload still parses as a smuggling pitch, but its centre of gravity has inverted: any careful reader is nudged to see cascading systemic risk and institutional negligence, not a neat, isolatable specimen pipeline ripe for profit.
Watching live diffs spool and resync, he finally names what his gut has circled: this is not random noise but editorial intent. The network is triaging harm, prioritizing infrastructures over individuals, inverting every incentive baked into corporate protocol. For a moment he hesitates, complicity, or alliance?, then tags the stream with his own hashes, folds Dev’s signatures in, and deliberately lets the organism’s cut overwrite Raghuveeran’s draft.
Raghuveeran reads the first clipped reply in the half-lit cocoon of his quarters, boots braced against opposite bulkheads, jaw tight. The buyer’s header pings green for encryption, red for sentiment: TERMS REVISION – RISK RECLASSIFICATION. Below, neat legalese bleeds contempt.
“…updated analysis of supplied telemetry indicates non-trivial coupling to host infrastructure. Asset reclassified as REG‑EXPOSED. Proposed compensation adjusted accordingly. Prior informal understandings regarding liability are void. Proceed only under certified isolation, multi-party oversight…”
He scrolls. Every line that once promised hazard uplifts, exclusivity bonuses, accelerated clearance has been quietly excised or inverted. Where they had praised his “unique access,” they now demand third-party verification, independent sampling witnesses, redundant custody chains that would drag his operation under a dozen watching eyes.
Another packet lands even before he reaches the footer. Corporate origin. Familiar signature.
The liaison doesn’t bother with pleasantries. No “Captain Raghukul,” no shared jokes about auditors.
“Refer: unsanctioned xenobiological contacts. New documentation has surfaced referencing deferred maintenance events under my former jurisdiction. To avoid conflict-of-interest exposure, I must withdraw all prior off-ledger facilitation. Any further transfers must comply with standard audited pathways and full hazard characterization.”
Embedded in the message are clipped hashes, cross-referencing old buried work orders (ones they had both agreed would “quietly vanish”) now echoed in the altered pitch. The same coolant manifold ticket he’d seen flit by in the organism’s redraft sits there like a curse.
Raghuveeran snorts, a short, humorless sound. “Ab tu saf ho gaya, haan?” he mutters at the frozen avatar. Now you’re clean.
Another asynchronous ping: a risk officer from the buyer’s side, nominally outside the chain, “seeking clarification.” The tone is polite, but the structure is an interrogation: List all intermediaries. Enumerate unlogged access points. Confirm you are sole decision authority. Confirm you understand regulatory provisions on biosphere endangerment and falsified maintenance records.
The shape emerges with brutal clarity. If a review board pulls this thread, it will lead straight through his routes, his crew, his name. The buyer shields itself behind compliance language; the liaison hides inside “proper channels.” Every safeguard they now insist on routes accountability away from themselves and towards the colonist captain who “overreached.”
In the corridor beyond his hatch, he can hear Manoj laughing with someone, the sound thin over life-support hum. In here, the air feels heavier, as if the station itself has shifted weight onto his shoulders.
They aren’t negotiating anymore, he realizes. They’re digging a firebreak.
On the wrong side of it, he burns alone.
Offers hollowed out
The negotiations that had buoyed Raghuveeran’s crew only cycles ago sour in a series of terse, asynchronous responses that blink across his console like quiet indictments. The off‑station buyer revises their terms downward in calibrated legalese, recategorizing the xenobiology from “high‑margin proprietary specimen” to “regulatory‑exposed risk asset,” attaching annex after annex on “shared liability frameworks” that, on close reading, share nothing. They demand multi‑point verification, redundant custodial logs, independent observers, and full traceability on how any sample is isolated from active station systems: requirements impossible to meet without dragging corporate oversight into every lock and hatch he’s ever used.
The corrupt corporate liaison, rattled by embedded references to maintenance tickets they once buried together, abruptly disavows all informal guarantees. Their message is cold, almost pious: any transfer must now move through audited channels with explicit hazard disclosures and full compliance sign‑off. No jokes, no side comments, only clauses.
The subtext is unmistakable. If anything goes wrong, Raghuveeran becomes the named origin of both ecological damage and paper‑trail fraud, while their own fingerprints dissolve into procedural fog and “good‑faith misunderstanding.”
While Raghuveeran scrambles to salvage leverage, another vector of positioning unfolds inside security. Manoj, unnerved by how the sensor blind spots had seemed to “follow” his cutting teams and by the sudden precision of queries about the coolant manifold lock, finally corners Vaidisha during a lull in her patrol.
“Dekho, we almost took a slice,” he confesses, voice low. “Live filaments. Captain thought we’d be in and out before any alarms.”
She doesn’t interrupt, just scrolls back through incident logs on her wristband, overlaying his halting account with timestamps from the organism‑induced glitches in comms and camera feeds. The pattern is too clean to be coincidence.
Someone will eventually package this, she realizes, as a redemption story: rogue colonist captain saves station from mysterious growth, demands concessions. Before that script can ossify in any briefing room, she drafts a tightly worded, low‑visibility memo into the internal system: “Attempted third‑party manipulation of critical xenobiological infrastructure. No confirmed identities; recommend heightened audit protocols and anonymized pattern watch on related anomalies.”
No names, no ship IDs. Just enough to ensure that when a “hero” finally steps forward, they’ll be walking into a file that has already framed the act as interference, not salvation.
Gambit exposed, options narrowed The convergence of skittish buyers, a suddenly pious corporate mole, and Vaidisha’s quiet paper trail tears through the assumptions under Raghuveeran’s play. His supposed advantage, exclusive, deniable access, mutates into a spotlight on his proximity to an officially logged interference attempt. If he pushes, he invites a full inquiry that could weld corporate compliance, security, and external regulators into a single hammer, with the altered packets and maintenance hashes recast as intent to deceive. If he retreats, he forfeits the windfall and political leverage he promised colonist backers already counting on upgraded life‑support. Worst of all, the organism’s masking behavior, once his secret tactical boon, now looks to outside eyes like an uncontrollable agent, maybe even one already in quiet partnership with rival humans, leaving him chasing an invisible editor who keeps revising the terms faster than he can speak.
From bold move to brittle stalemate
Cornered by circumstances he no longer fully understands, Raghuveeran finds his negotiating space compressed into an uneasy middle ground. His allies still take his calls, but only through channels tagged “monitor,” “conditional,” never “trusted,” and only for smaller favors: discreet routing tweaks, rumors traded for minor resupply. Corporate security, primed by Vaidisha’s memo and by the manifold’s logged anomaly, treats any sudden claim of privileged insight into the xenobiology with procedural skepticism and quiet cross-checks. He is too visible to simply drift away: docking timestamps, his crew’s patterns near the coolant spines, and dockside whispers about “living shields” all knot his name into the emerging story. Yet he lacks clean documentation or an uncontested narrative thread to seize command of it. What was meant as a decisive, fortune-making maneuver congeals into a fragile deadlock, where every outreach risks reclassification from “source” to “suspect,” and every hesitation cedes more narrative ground to whoever next convinces the station they speak for the organism.
Rewriting the battlefield
Instead of scrambling to erase their tracks, the hastily formed alliance leans into the organism’s intervention.
Vaishnavi’s alert trees are still stuttering, their branching risk-models recalibrating around the manifold lock. In the narrow breathing space that creates, Kavitesh and Dev wedge themselves into a half-lit maintenance node two decks down from the official lab ring, backs braced against humming conduits. Someone’s taped a curling Hanuman sticker beside the access panel; the only functioning light strips pulse between corporate white and colonist-jury‑rigged amber.
They’ve jacked a battered laborer console into a maintenance trunk that brushes three different subnetworks. Data slams through the line in uneven pulses: laborer duct humidity logs, auxiliary hull cams, coolant telemetry from spines no corporate analyst has looked at in months. Dev’s fingers dance across improvised filter scripts, re‑labeling fields, spoofing origins.
“Yeh dekho,” he mutters, blowing an errant curl off his forehead. “Sharanam filter stacks, Raghukul hull plates, Vaishnavi cross‑tie. Same phase shift when anyone goes too close.”
Kavitesh routes the mess into the analytical suite he’d originally used to flag the anomaly, stripped down and side‑loaded into this grey‑zone terminal. Processing icons stutter, then stabilize as the organism’s signatures resolve into probability fields and correlation webs.
They don’t aim for completeness. They aim for shape.
Every feed they allow through, every segment they blur or drop, changes what the station’s systems will be able to “see.” They highlight the way growth densities spike near stressed infrastructure but carefully truncate any sequences that would let a hostile model back‑calculate precise coordinates. Response curves to human proximity? Yes, charted, annotated. Exact timing of those sensor blind spots that sheltered Manoj’s teams? Redacted into statistical “noise.”
Dev glances sideways. “We show too little, they’ll call it superstition. Too much, they send in sterilization drones.”
“Balanced ambiguity,” Kavitesh says, more to himself than to Dev. “Enough to prove it’s distributed, adaptive, responsive. Not enough to turn it into a target map.”
His prosthetic hand hovers over a set of toggles, gold inlays catching the recycled light. Each click accepts or excludes a cluster of datapoints; each cluster will later translate into budget lines, jurisdictional claims, quarantine radii.
“For once,” he murmurs, “the peer reviewer is also the prosecution.”
Dev snorts softly. “And we’re both expert witnesses and accused.”
The final render they coax from the suite is a carefully wounded truth: a station‑wide network whose densest knots are mathematically “indeterminate,” whose origin points dissolve into overlapping error bars. It is impossible to draw a clean perimeter around it without, by definition, drawing a perimeter around the station itself.
On another screen, Vaishnavi’s alert lattice slowly re‑greens, branches ticking from “unknown critical” down to “monitor.” In that narrow interval between panic and procedure, the two men quietly redraw the epistemic battleground on which all future orders will be written.
Framing an ecology, not a threat
Savitriya joins them over a jittery low-bandwidth link from Sargam, her face haloed by drifting students and half-dimmed lesson holos cycling through orbital food webs and dharmic axioms. Her voice, when it cuts through the static, is steady.
“Raw correlations won’t be enough,” she says. “They’ll see what they’re trained to see: infection vectors, liability.”
She begins stitching a narrative sheath around the dataset, drawing on months of quiet listening: maintenance workers describing “soft zones” in ducts where rust stopped spreading; a refugee med tech from Sharanam whose patients’ coughs eased after a biofilm patch turned the vent grills opalescent; a colonist mechanic at Raghukul swearing micrometeorite pings dropped along filament-heavy struts, as if something was cushioning the hull.
She tags each clip with context (shift times, environmental readings, emotional tone) until the numbers on Kavitesh’s screen acquire faces, accents, stakes. This is not a rogue contaminant but an emergent “station ecology,” already braided through air handling, water polishing, and micro‑shielding in ways no single department owns.
“Break it,” she concludes, “and you don’t just risk systems failure. You rupture people’s sense of home.”
By the time she closes the link, the dataset no longer reads like grounds for a sterilization protocol, but like an invitation for a station‑wide ethical argument over what, exactly, now counts as Prithvi‑Parikrama.
Turning liability into a leash
In Sharanam’s cramped checkpoint office, with recycled air tasting faintly of disinfectant and boiled lentils, Vaidisha skims the live alert feed while Kavitesh’s and Dev’s patched‑together packet compiles in a side window. Her jaw works as she threads their fragile advantage into the rigid grammar of security procedure.
She doesn’t label it revelation, or breakthrough: just “anomaly correlation: cross‑sector.” Inside that dull heading, she braids the composite: partial maps, Savitriya’s testimonies, response curves. Then she buries knives in the footnotes. Specific clauses from biocontainment, civil‑protection, even refugee‑resettlement statutes: acknowledgment of structural integration; evidence of sentient‑like responsiveness; warnings about disproportionate impact on protected populations if crude sterilization is attempted.
Any unilateral excision order now implies prior knowledge of foreseeable harm. Foreseeable harm implies liability. She routes copies not only up the security chain but sideways: governance subcommittees overseeing infrastructure audits, ethics review panels that almost never meet, a dormant oversight desk whose officer still remembers her work during a refugee riot and owes her two uncashed favors. She tags the packet with just enough procedural urgency to require signatures, but not enough to trigger instant quarantine.
By the time her console pings “filed,” the organism is no longer just a hazard in the system. On paper, it has become an entity whose mistreatment could stain careers, void insurance guarantees, and drag the corporation into tribunal hearings that board members dread more than any unknown microbe.
Teaching the network the station
Manoj, restless in a cramped tug cockpit docked two arms from Raghuveeran’s freighter, adds a different layer: paths. He pushes his personal nav logs and hand‑annotated approach maps through Kavitesh’s models, flagging EVA‑safe trusses, corridors with minimal surveillance overlap, and the ghost routes only pilots whisper about. Vectors that let a hull skim hull without ever existing on an official chart. Fed as structured “nudges” into responsive zones near the outer skin and manifold, these rhythms of approach and retreat seem to take: in test pings, sensor noise fattens along Manoj’s preferred arteries and thins to glassy clarity over high‑risk chokepoints and customs lanes. It’s as if the network is beginning to mirror his instincts, sketching its own image of lanes and sanctuaries. They’re no longer just hiding behind its masking; they’re teaching it what humans mean by “safe passage,” wagering that mutual habit can harden into mutual obligation.
For Raghuveeran, the new arrangement tastes like defeat and survival in equal measure. With his name circulating in half‑redacted memos and his usual deniability eroding, he accepts that the era of hauling raw growths in cold crates is over: for him, at least. Over a secure channel patched through Manoj’s tug, he offers a revised deal to his scattered contacts: no more bulk biomass, only derivative tech, insights, and negotiated access filtered through the alliance’s constraints. In return, he demands concrete concessions for colonist sectors. Priority maintenance on failing recyclers, improved medical allotments, softer enforcement on minor infractions. He becomes less a rogue biocargo kingpin and more a broker of favors bound to a living wildcard. It grates, but he can read a tide: better to ride this thing than drown under it. The “score” they walk away with is not something any of them can own or fence: a sentient‑leaning, station‑spanning system whose documented presence and unpredictable cooperation now limit how ruthlessly corporate, colonist, or smuggler can move without the reluctant consent of all the others.
Docked to Manoj’s hull via a disguised service cradle, a slim courier pod rides the tug’s vibration like a remora, its dull-grey plating sprayed with the same maintenance stencils as half a dozen legitimate tool pallets. Inside its cramped belly, Kavitesh’s and Dev’s payload is double-layered: physical drives sleeved in radiation baffles cut from surplus reactor shielding, and sensor cores wrapped in the scuffed housings of obsolete calibration units scavenged from laborer decks.
On Sharanam’s dim lower tier, Dev hunches over a flickering laborer-terminal, the plastisteel of the casing gone shiny where thousands of tired hands have rested. His fingers move in tight, economical bursts, eyes darting between the official maintenance interface and a skeletonized script he’d hidden under a devotional wallpaper of Saraswati. He doesn’t look up as a child runs past shrieking in play; the background chaos is cover. With three quick authorizations cloned from long-retired technicians, he injects a maintenance work order into the queue. Routine calibration resupply for Vaishnavi’s airflow analyzers, tagged low-priority, non-hazardous.
Across the station, under cleaner light and corporate air, Kavitesh stands at a side console in Vaishnavi, lab coat hanging open, AR visor ghosting notifications at the edge of his vision. He scrolls through the day’s intake manifests, heart ticking faster than he lets show. There: the forged work order surfaces in the stream, indistinguishable from a dozen others. His prosthetic fingers twitch once, a micro-mudra to steady himself, before he adds a quiet preauthorization: batch verified, no additional biosecurity review required.
The system chimes a soft, neutral acknowledgment. In a nearby reflection alcove, Ganesha’s stylized holo-form flickers blue-white over a brass inlay as the status icon beside the courier pod’s ID flips to green. When Manoj’s tug crosses the boundary into Vaishnavi’s authority radius, the pod’s handshake arrives in Central Intake as nothing more than mundane tooling en route to a scheduled calibration cycle: no alarms, no flags, just another line item swallowed by the station’s immaculate bureaucracy.
Docked to Manoj’s hull via a disguised service cradle, the slim courier pod rides the tug’s minute vibration like a remora, its dull-grey plating sprayed with the same maintenance stencils as half a dozen legitimate tool pallets. Inside its cramped belly, Kavitesh’s and Dev’s payload is double-layered: physical drives sleeved in radiation baffles cut from surplus reactor shielding, and sensor cores wrapped in the scuffed housings of obsolete calibration units scavenged from laborer decks.
On Sharanam’s dim lower tier, Dev hunches over a flickering laborer-terminal, the plastisteel of the casing gone shiny where thousands of tired hands have rested. His fingers move in tight, economical bursts, eyes darting between the official maintenance interface and a skeletonized script he’s hidden under a devotional wallpaper of Saraswati. He doesn’t look up as a child runs past shrieking in play; the background chaos is cover. With three quick authorizations cloned from long-retired technicians, he injects a maintenance work order into the queue. Routine calibration resupply for Vaishnavi’s airflow analyzers, tagged low-priority, non-hazardous.
Across the station, under cleaner light and corporate air, Kavitesh stands at a side console in Vaishnavi, lab coat hanging open, AR visor ghosting notifications at the edge of his vision. He scrolls through the day’s intake manifests, heart ticking faster than he lets show. There: the forged work order surfaces in the stream, indistinguishable from a dozen others. His prosthetic fingers twitch once, a micro-mudra to steady himself, before he adds a quiet preauthorization: batch verified, no additional biosecurity review required.
The system chimes a soft, neutral acknowledgment. In a nearby reflection alcove, Ganesha’s stylized holo-form flickers blue-white over a brass inlay as the status icon beside the courier pod’s ID flips to green. When Manoj’s tug crosses the boundary into Vaishnavi’s authority radius, the pod’s handshake arrives in Central Intake as nothing more than mundane tooling en route to a scheduled calibration cycle: no alarms, no flags, just another line item swallowed by the station’s immaculate bureaucracy.
On a staggered count synced to Manoj’s telemetry pings, Raghuveeran initiates undocking from Raghukul with deliberate, performative sloppiness. Clamp release lags by a fraction of a second, just long enough to trigger a mild proximity squawk that customs officers have seen a hundred times from tired colonist crews. His engineers bring the reactor online in a deliberately noisy startup curve, harmonics flaring right as a laden ore barge spools its own drives in the adjacent arm. When he calls for the first course correction, it just happens to drag the freighter’s vector through a corridor where the hull growth’s EM haze is thickest. The ship’s anomalous power signatures vanish into a sea of jittery telemetry, dutifully logged by overworked customs as “environmental interference: colonist docks, expected.”
In Sharanam, as automated health monitors flag a follow-up scan on earlier contamination alerts, Vaidisha intercepts the request before it routes to central. She “optimizes” the patrol scheduler: reassigns one unit to a high-visibility corridor near the main gate, tags another for routine calibration, and quietly downgrades the crawlway cluster above the densest growth to “low-traffic, low-risk” using her own sanitized air-quality readings as justification. The resulting audit trail suggests heightened vigilance in public thoroughfares, commendable resource efficiency: and benign neglect exactly where the organism needs uninterrupted space to braid itself deeper into Sharanam’s ducts.
In Sargam’s central sphere, Savitriya times her lesson on “distributed attention and shared bodies” to the minute of the scheduled security sweep. Mid-sentence, her wrist-bands trigger a rehearsed “AR module failure,” holo-text stuttering into pixelated fragments. Students, well-trained, drift in deliberate stillness, eyes closed as if obeying a meditation cue, while her bands spew innocuous driver faults and buffer overflows into the audit log. When the bots ping the hub, they register nothing more than an under-funded classroom choking on outdated firmware; they never glimpse the encrypted testimonies threading out through a throttled maintenance channel, their signature already drowned beneath the organism’s soft EM shimmer along the station’s spine.
In Vaishnavi’s glass-walled conference pod, Earthlight knifed in at a shallow angle, catching the faint smear of Kavitesh’s thumbprints on the table’s holo-surface. Across from him, three members of the oversight committee sat in a tight crescent, corporate badges pulsing a slow, synchronized blue. Behind them, a fourth figure from Legal hovered, silent and recording.
Red-flag overlays strobed above the table: clipped segments of his recent work sessions, telemetry feeds annotated in angry corporate orange. Anomalous drops in sensor resolution. Synchronized “noise” bursts in multiple sectors that should have been statistically independent. A senior reviewer with a white streak in his hair pinched to zoom on one jagged gap.
“Doctor Rao,” he said, voice kept deliberately flat, “explain how a micro-ecology confined to your containment pods coincides with network-wide blind spots on life-support and structural arrays.”
The accusation was in the framing: supposedly confined, supposedly transparent. Kavitesh could feel the weight of the biometric readers tracking his pulse, his pupil dilation. He steadied his prosthetic hand against the table, letting the haptic ridges under his palm anchor him.
“It doesn’t,” he said. “Not if we keep imagining it as ‘confined.’”
He called up Dev’s airflow and coolant anomaly maps with a twitch of his fingers. The raw telemetry unfolded in layered gradients: pressure drifts, micro-temperature shears, improbable laminar channels threading through what should have been turbulent systems.
“Look here,” he said, tracing with his flesh hand so the gesture would read as less threatening. “These distortions don’t propagate along access credentials or user sessions. They propagate along steel and composite: ducts, coolant jackets, cable trunks. They ignore logical partitions and follow physical infrastructure.”
“And your point?” the woman from Systems cut in, thin mouth tightening. “We asked how your samples leaked into. He forced his jaw loose. “You’re looking at a distributed organism co‑opting the station’s plumbing and conduits as sensory channels. We’re past ‘contamination’; we’re observing integration.”
He let that word hang: integration, not breach.
He expanded another layer: overlapping bands of EM jitter mapped against those same physical lines.
“The so‑called blind spots appear where these bands intensify,” he continued. “When you push for higher sampling rates” (he flicked to a trial run one junior tech had initiated without telling him, sensors spiking, then dropping into static) “the system responds with broader misalignment. CO₂ scrubber readings wander, thermal tolerances drift. It’s not just hiding from us; it’s pushing back through the same channels we use to watch it.”
“So it’s hostile,” Legal said quietly, the first word he’d offered. “You’re telling us it’s capable of degrading safety systems.”
“I’m telling you it’s capable of re‑balancing flows when it perceives intrusion,” Kavitesh replied. “Hostility implies intent we can’t yet support. What we can support is that any attempt to ‘rip it out’ or brute‑force more data will be interpreted as a perturbation. In a network already entangled with life‑support, that is not a variable you want to kick.”
He swiped in a final overlay: deviance curves from a simulated purge scenario he and Dev had run offline, extrapolated from the organism’s real responses. Alarm thresholds scattered across the ring: humidity surges in Sharanam‑analog sectors, O₂ overshoot in colonist‑deck stand‑ins, transient CO₂ spikes in a Vaishnavi mock‑up.
“You are proposing we… do nothing?” the Systems woman asked, incredulous.
“I am proposing we stop thinking in terms of extraction and start thinking in terms of coexistence,” he said. “Slow, observational protocols. Gentle probes through channels it’s already using, with feedback limits so we don’t trigger wholesale sensor drift. Treat it like a new subsystem sharing our hull, not a stain on a petri dish.”
He watched their faces as he spoke the next line, measured and deliberate.
“Because right now, the organism is learning to see us through our own instruments. If we antagonize that learning curve, we risk blinding the station at the exact moment we most need it to keep looking.”
The senior reviewer flicked to a different overlay: a lattice of greyed‑out timestamps threading through Kavitesh’s recent sessions. “And these?” he asked. “Coordinated gaps in environmental logs across four sectors, all coincident with your peak activity windows. Explain the masking.”
The word landed like a charge. Masking. He felt every camera in the pod tilt inward.
He made himself nod slowly, as if conceding the strangeness rather than the blame. “Yes. Those are the most interesting part.”
A gesture pulled Dev’s composite heatmaps into the air, layered with EM noise traces. The bland corporate red‑flags dissolved into cooler gradients, blues and violets pooling where the logs fell silent.
“Notice where the so‑called masks form,” he said. “Not around user IDs, not around access groups. They cluster where EM ‘whispers’ spike along cable trunks, where airflow simulation predicts persistent micro‑vortices. The pattern repeats across decks that share no staff, no shift roster: only infrastructure.”
Systems frowned. “You’re saying your organism is… censoring us?”
“I’m saying it’s experimenting with selective visibility,” he replied. “Probing what our system notices and what it lets slide. Think of it as a child learning which corners of a room are watched.”
He let the Legal observer absorb that before he went on, voice lower.
“If you interpret this as human tampering, you’ll deploy forensic scrubs, forced recalibrations, aggressive sampling. From the organism’s point of view, that’s a massive, violent perturbation delivered through the same channels it uses to ‘breathe’ and ‘see.’”
He expanded a side panel: projections of cascading alarm states under heavy intrusive diagnostics, CO₂ and thermal bands flaring in angry orange.
“The scientific opportunity is that we are witnessing the first stages of an infrastructure‑entangled attention system. One that is already braided through life‑support, hull sensing, maybe even navigation beacons. The operational risk is that, if we frighten it, it may respond by broadening these masks. Wider blind zones. Slower fault detection. Not an attack, simply an organism trying to shut its eyes against pain.”
He drew his hands back from the holo, palms open.
“So yes, the logs are being masked. But by something learning the contours of our surveillance. If we move fast and hard, we teach it that our scrutiny is a threat. If we move slowly, observationally, we stand a chance of aligning its ‘attention’ with our own safety needs instead of driving it into full, systemic avoidance.”
Down in the colonist docks, Manoj sits under harsh strip lights in a cramped debrief booth, the thin cushion hissing under his weight every time he shifts. A customs officer in a faded corporate vest scrubs back and forth through his last approach vector on a jittering holo, lips pursed. The trace shows odd, stuttering course-corrections near known hull-growth regions, micro-zigs that would only register if you went looking.
Manoj slouches deeper, stretching theatrically until his shoulders thump the bulkhead, and rattles off a litany of mundane causes: a miscalibrated lateral thruster he “has been begging maintenance to look at,” interference from overloaded cargo batteries, kids kicking off bulkheads and bouncing sensor pings. He throws in a gripe about cheap colonist-grade gyros, peppers his defense with self-deprecating jokes about “flying by jugaad” in colonist space, inviting the officer to read the anomalies as the natural consequence of sloppy hardware, crowded lanes, and overconfident piloting rather than deliberate evasion. All the while, he carefully avoids eye-contact when the playback stutters nearest the organism’s rumored “listening” patches along the hull.
The officer’s tone sharpens as he highlights Manoj’s repeated use of under‑patrolled corridors, suggesting pattern rather than coincidence. Manoj lets his smile fade into put‑upon irritation, complaining that “polite traffic lanes” are designed for corporate parade runs, not real freight surges. He pulls up live berth-queue stats, shows how his shortcut shaved twelve minutes off a congested window, and taps a recent near-collision report in a sanctioned lane as supporting evidence. “You want fewer accidents, na, or prettier telemetry?” he mutters, just loud enough. The officer, eyes gritty and inbox overflowing, finds no contraband spikes, no unscheduled mass shifts. Procedure satisfied, he logs a stern warning for “reckless piloting” and waves Manoj out. Walking back into the noisy, grease-scented docks, Manoj replays the interrogation in his head, quietly charting which vectors drew the most questions (and which slipped by) folding that pattern into his mental map of the organism’s sensor-shadowed approaches for the next risky run.
In Sharanam, two junior analysts half-heartedly skim backscroll, their eyes barely flicking over Vaidisha’s immaculate “minor biofilm irregularity” ticket. Containment steps documented, photographic evidence attached, post-cleaning swabs certified: all signed off within one shift. With no anomalies propagated into adjacent sectors and no contraband cross-tags, the system shunts it into the auto-closed graveyard. Across the station, in central archives, a tired data reviewer pauses at a keyword flare in routine education transcripts: “listening hull,” spoken during one of Savitriya’s mixed-class sessions. He frowns, curiosity finally pricking through fatigue, and taps the audio icon. The waveform hiccups. A scheduled compression batch collides with a barely measurable EM flutter rippling through the storage array; error-correction routines fold at precisely the wrong microsecond. The ten-minute segment degrades into hiss and broken syllables, checksum quietly rewritten. The alert daemon, receiving only corrupted payload, downgrades the flag and lets it expire. When lockdown directives start cascading through the network a few minutes later, the only trace that phrasing ever existed is a dead link and a line of metadata no one has reason to question.
Raghuveeran walks the Raghukul docks in a new, uncomfortable light: merchants and captains still call him “bhaiya,” but the stories have shifted from his rumored hunt for a mythic payload to hushed accounts of how he refused to carve up a living system. The same hands that once clapped his shoulders, praising his nose for profit, now linger an extra second as if testing what kind of man they’re touching. At canteen tables wedged between cargo nets, conversations dip when he passes, then resume with altered phrasing. Less about “jackpot biomass,” more about “that captain who said no.”
Deals come slower yet steadier. The quick-score traders, the ones who dream of one miraculous haul to buy out their contracts and retire planetside, drift toward other docking arms, toward captains willing to risk hull and crew for raw growth stripped from the “listening” plates. They mutter he’s gone soft, that orbit has thinned his blood, that he’s started talking like some Vaishnavi ethics slideshow. A few do it within earshot, testing him. Raghuveeran just raises an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth tightening, and lets their words slide off like dust in recycled air.
But other faces, older mechanics with burn-scarred fingers, ship-mothers who run communal kitchens, younger pilots who’ve patched too many microfractures by hand, seek him out with quiet intent. They lean across crate-stacks and speak in low tones about hull anomalies they’ve seen, about strange, self-healing seams where corporate inspectors only see “corrosion.” They ask for routes that won’t strip bare the sectors where the growth runs deepest. They want contracts that keep their freighters flying ten years from now instead of gambling everything on one dangerous pull.
Raghuveeran adjusts. He trims his manifests, rewrites clauses: no raw xenobiological harvest, derivative data only, liability shared if corporate crackdowns come. The margins look thinner on his tablet, lines of numbers shrinking where they should swell. Yet there’s a different kind of leverage accruing in the pauses between signatures. The unspoken understanding that his name now stands for ships that come back with their plates intact, for runs that respect the strange, unseen hands cradling the metal between stars.
At night-cycle, anchored in a narrow observation blister looking out over the sprawl of the station, he fingers the small trishul at his neck and thinks about reputations: the old one that saw the station as carcass to be stripped, and this emerging one that treats it, warily, as something more like kin. The first bought him fear and fast money. The second, he suspects, is buying him time.
On his ship, the tension runs along cargo‑strut seams, a hairline stress you can’t see on scanners but feel in the way conversations kink and split. In the mess, spoons clink a little sharper against metal bowls as a few of the older hands let their eyes linger on sealed data cores and sensor rigs where, not long ago, insulated biotanks might have sat. They do quiet arithmetic over watered dal, what a single live crate could have fetched out in the fringe, how many debts cleared, how many berth-rents paid, and mutter about “ghost cargo” and “numbers on a screen instead of the real thing.”
A younger gunner snorts that you can’t cook data or burn it for emergency heat, and laughter sparks, brittle and brief. Yet in the same cramped room, others eat in thoughtful silence, replaying the memory of the hull trembling like skin, of biomass tightening protectively around a blistered plate. For them, the absence of tanks is a comfort. They’ve seen enough near‑breach alarms to imagine what happens when you rip out the very thing holding metal together. They share quick, sidelong glances with Raghuveeran as he passes.
Manoj’s reputation twists into something half‑legend, half‑liability. In the canteens and EVA prep rooms, pilots swap embellished tales of how he threaded approach vectors through sensor‑shadowed corridors where the station itself seemed to lean aside; in some retellings, the hull “breathed” around his shuttle, opening and closing invisible gaps just for him. Apprentices start asking him not just for flight tips, but for “feel”: how to read the subtle interference where metal and micro‑ecology overlap, which shiver in the stick means turbulence and which means you’re skimming along a living seam.
When he jokes about being on a corporate watch‑list now, a few veterans clap his shoulder in quiet respect, while others quietly tag him as a magnet for trouble and future audits. The label doesn’t bother him as much as he expected. In the dim glow of a dockside viewport, watching faint auroras crawl over the station’s skin, he tests micro‑burns and tiny yaw adjustments, learning the organism’s quirks the way he once learned asteroid debris fields. Risk and reverence braid together in his instincts: he is no priest, no scientist, only a pilot who suddenly has to navigate not just machinery and gravity wells, but a vast, listening body that might decide whether his ship gets safe passage or a silent, final collision.
In Vaishnavi’s internal documentation flows, Dev’s name surfaces for the first time as more than a line‑item. His models appear in appendices and risk dashboards, credited in cramped footnotes that don’t mention the sleepless nights in worker maintenance bays or the off‑the‑books sampling that made them possible. Colleagues who once nodded past him at access gates now send terse, respectful queries; senior analysts forward his projections with cautious praise, cc’ing managers who still mispronounce his name. The recognition tastes sweet, metallic on his tongue, but every redacted reference is a reminder of how much of his real work must stay buried to keep both the organism and his community safe: and how easily the corporation could erase him again if he pushes too far, too fast.
Out in the Sargam Free-Float Hub and the Sharanam corridors, Savitriya feels the narrative congeal around her despite her caution. Children repeat garbled versions of her metaphors (saying she “speaks to the station”) while older students from corporate labs and colonist crews bring her half-joking, half-anxious questions about what the new life “wants,” whether it forgives, whether it chooses favorites. She resists being cast as oracle, redirecting conversations toward shared responsibility and the mundane ethics of filter maintenance, traffic scheduling, and quarantine consent. Yet the role of quiet arbiter and interpreter settles over her classes, aligning her path with the emerging sense that the habitat itself has become a moral stakeholder in their future, listening through vents and coolant lines.
Raghuveeran waits until the cargo bay’s main doors cycle shut and the indicator lamps drop to standby amber before he speaks. The space smells of cold metal and old incense; someone’s taped a faded colony flag over a cracked bulkhead, its edges lifting in the draft from the coolant conduits. Manoj floats cross‑legged on a cargo net, boots hooked under a tie‑down, as they angle the shared slate between them.
Encrypted files unfold in layered schematics: routing overlays ghosted on a wireframe of Prithvi‑Parikrama, faint green arcs showing approach vectors that lean into low‑risk “soft spots” where the organism has thickened the hull. Another pane lists heuristic flags in terse, color‑coded lines: probability spikes when organism‑stabilized microfractures are near their stress thresholds, subtle shifts in thermal bleed and EM scatter that mean, in Dev’s compact notation, do not push here.
Manoj lets out a low whistle. “Bhai, this is… yeh toh alag hi level hai. You know what the outer‑rim ports will pay for something like this? Not just not dying. Arriving on time without shredding half their hull.”
The slate scrolls again, revealing annotations in Kavitesh’s precise Hindi‑English hybrid: warnings about ecological feedback if too many ships lean on the same softened corridors, notes on how “localized overuse may induce compensatory hardening responses in adjacent sectors,” and a repeated refrain: use conservatively; treat as shared infrastructure, not exploitative asset.
Raghuveeran’s expression barely shifts. Years of bargaining with hungry officials and desperate colonists keep his face in that careful, impassive set. “Notice what’s missing,” he says quietly. “No growth‑pattern seeds, no metabolic breakdown. They’ve given us where not to step too hard, not where to start digging.”
Manoj glances sideways at him. “Guardrails, haan. Not keys.”
He nods. “They want us alive, and they don’t want us owning the road.” His thumb hovers over the accept icon, the encrypted handshake that will bind his ship’s systems to periodic syncs with Vaishnavi’s curated feed. “If we take this, we’re agreeing (for now) to sell caution. Safer routes, stress limits, ‘do not cross’ lines. Not shortcuts.”
“Safer sells,” Manoj argues. “Colonies don’t just want contraband, they want to make next monsoon cycle.”
“Until some other captain promises more.” Raghuveeran stares at the web of green arcs, seeing in them both margin and leash. The organism’s quiet preferences, interpreted through a corporate scientist’s ethics, through Dev’s telemetry, finally reaching him as risk ceilings he did not set.
He exhales, the sound swallowed by the bay’s insulation. “Fine. We start with this. No raw biomass, no deep poking. We trade in not breaking what’s keeping us all breathing.”
He taps confirm. The slate’s status light flickers, then settles to a steady pulse. Connection established, on terms none of them fully control. For a moment, in the half‑lit silence, he becomes aware of the subtle vibration under his palm, the sense, not belief, not yet, that the cargo bay’s skin is listening.
“Route us through one of those soft spots next run,” he tells Manoj, voice low. “Gently. I want to see if this… neighbor of ours likes us keeping to the lines.”
In the glass-walled briefing pod on Vaishnavi, the planet’s auroral band sliding slowly past behind frosted holo panes, Dev stands half a step behind Kavitesh, unsure where to park his hands. The supervisor, mid-level, immaculate, eyes never quite settling on Dev, flicks through the access schema hovering between them: tiered log-ins, partitioned datasets, a weekly two-hour escorted window in a mid-tier containment pod “for targeted calibration of labor-sector risk models.”
The language is all outreach and synergy. “We value insights from worker-facing technicians.” “Bridging analytical gaps between decks.” Dev hears, instead, the quieter bargain riding under every clause. They are not inviting him in; they are tightening how he can be useful.
He traces the logic as the supervisor talks. If his models keep showing how aggressive sampling in laborer and colonist decks pushes life-support toward failure modes then leadership can point to dashboards, not ethics, when they argue for restraint. “Operational prudence,” not “we owe them clean air.”
Beside him, Kavitesh’s prosthetic fingers flex once, almost imperceptibly. Dev files that away. At least one person here understands what’s being traded.
In the Sargam hub’s central sphere, bodies drift in loose orbits as Savitriya anchors herself with a toe-hook and calls up layered holos. Incident timestamps bead along translucent ducts; refugee voice-snippets, scrubbed of names, murmur about “shimmering dust,” “breathing walls,” “filters that hum back.” Over this she unfurls a translucent cross-section of Prithvi‑Parikrama, the organism’s modeled reach sketched in soft, pulsing bands. Not hazard zones, she explains, but “rooms in a shared house.”
They close their eyes through a short, guided rotation: notice breath, notice the faint vibration of pumps, imagine yourself as one cell among billions. Afterward, a colonist loader, a refugee medic, a junior corporate analyst all speak in turn about “care of walls” as moral practice. Savitriya only asks questions, never answers.
In a cramped policy-drafting node near Sharanam’s gate, shoulder brushing exposed conduit, Vaidisha leans over a jittering console with a junior legal officer, carefully threading clauses into a proposed xenobiological incident protocol: quarantine designations must draw on multi-sector sensor corroboration; no single low-status zone can be labeled “primary containment buffer” without independent technical review; emergency evacuations must follow proportional-risk metrics rather than political convenience or “logistical efficiency.” The language is dry, buried under cross‑references and sub‑subsections, but she slowly underlines the passage that explicitly lists “refugee annexes and informal housing modules” as protected categories, then adds a citation to an obscure equal-access bylaw. In some future panic, when frightened executives start shouting for clear space and easy sacrifice, this footnote and its chain of references might be the only thin legal shield between her people and the airlock.
Back in his Vaishnavi lab, Kavitesh watches a time‑lapse composite of the organism’s subtle adjustments to airflow and coolant across multiple decks, the masking filter he coded now operating as both veil and aperture. He’s tagged it as “longitudinal observation” and “systems‑stability impact assessment,” bureaucratic phrasing chosen to blunt any demand for harvest metrics. As he spins up another non‑invasive cycle, no biopsies, only field readings, he murmurs a mantra, prosthetic fingers resting on the console frame. For the first time, his sanctioned work feels less like complicity and more like a holding action, a deliberately lengthened breath in which this nascent station ecology and the humans cocooned inside it might sense each other’s patterns before someone orders the cut.
In a sealed conference node far from Vaishnavi’s bright main corridors, a handful of senior executives and risk officers sit strapped into discreet grav‑chairs, eyes reflecting the pale wash of a redacted playback. Kavitesh’s voice, flattened by compression and legal filters, narrates networked responsiveness, cross‑sector coupling, non‑linear feedback into life‑support. His careful language about “station ecology” survives; his more candid comments about moral status and cohabitation do not. On the main wall, the edited deck has already been overlaid with actuarial overlays: color‑coded risk tiers, projected downtime losses, litigation exposure curves.
When the lights rise, no one speaks of his ethical caveats, only of “unbounded liability surfaces” and “systemic contagion vectors.” A risk officer from Corporate Governance taps a stylus against the section showing the organism’s reach into Sharanam and the colonist docks, recoding it in the discussion as “uncontrolled growth in low‑assurance sectors.” Another executive coolly notes the PR costs if rumors of “living hulls” cross into open feeds before the company can frame a narrative.
The decision crystallizes not as a shouted order but as a sequence of small, practiced gestures: a nod, a signed authorization token, a murmured instruction to “route through standard mitigation channels.” Within hours, deep in a separate, access‑controlled system tree, an encrypted procurement chain spools out: off‑station contractors specializing in biodefense, autonomous counter‑bio pods rated for hull‑embedded remediation, firmware packages flagged for “aggressive pattern pruning.”
The mandate is phrased with numbing bureaucratic care, “contingency neutralization for emergent, non‑certified bio‑networks intersecting mission‑critical infrastructure”, and buried under routine risk‑abatement codes tied to old mold outbreaks and coolant‑line blooms. Routing tags ensure the work order stays below Vaishnavi’s research dashboards and outside xenobiology review queues. On paper, nothing contradicts the cautious observational protocol Kavitesh just won. In the shadowed architecture of Corporate Risk, however, a parallel response path comes quietly online, pointed not toward understanding but toward erasure should the organism, or its human advocates, step outside the bounds the company finds tolerable.
Out beyond the station’s traffic halo, where Prithvi-Parikrama is just a faint, spoked glimmer against Earth’s auroral rim, Raghuveeran’s freighter drifts on minimal thrust, attitude jets ticking in stingy bursts. Fuel warnings simmer at the edge of the console. He ignores them, eyes fixed on the narrow‑beam packet slowly unfurling across his display.
The outer‑system buyer’s primary message is thin and bloodless: acknowledgment of receipt, acceptance of the revised terms, a capped schedule of payments for derivative datasets “meeting specified anonymization thresholds.” Corporate‑polite, contract‑lawyer precise. He exhales, almost a laugh; this is the price of having bent, just slightly, toward Savitriya’s ethics, Dev’s fears, Kavitesh’s cautions.
Then the appended payload unlocks under a secondary key.
No greeting this time. Just speculative valuations for raw biomass by mass and complexity index, side‑band notes on “salvage allowances,” and a final list of anonymized “alternate vectors” already being sounded: other captains, other stations, dedicated harvest teams. Timelines. Contingency bonuses.
Raghuveeran stares at the numbers until they blur. With a flick, he scrubs the packet from local buffers and shadow archives, severing the tightbeam. In the silence that follows, he cannot tell whether he has just shielded the station. Or simply stepped aside so someone with fewer scruples can make the first brutal cut.
In the smoky pilot lounges and along the encrypted chatter nets braided through Raghukul docks, Manoj keeps hearing it. Half‑brag, half‑whisper. A rival crew, outer‑ring hotshots with more swagger than sense, claiming they’ve found “ghost lanes” that let them skim past customs scans as if the station itself leans aside for them. Over shared diagnostics and back‑channel dumps, they flash telemetry: sensor dropouts, anomalous drag minima, comm pings that arrive smeared and late. The signatures rhyme, beat for beat, with the corridors he and the organism once coaxed into being. Minus the dampers, minus the agreed‑upon feedback ceilings. Listening from the corner of a crowded bench, Manoj feels a hard, cold knot settle under his ribs. Someone is replaying his improvisations as a dare, inviting a response from a network nobody has truly charted. And this time, there is no one riding brake.
On a ragged shift-change in the laborer decks, Dev pauses at a junction where the bulkhead has been repurposed into an anonymous message wall. Among union slogans, shift-rotation gripes, and obscene cartoons, a new motif repeats: crude mycelial lattices wrapped around a sketch of the station, captions alternating between “Rakshak” and “Khatarnaak.” One drawing threads tendrils specifically around coolant trunks he’s sampled before. He snaps a surreptitious image to his pad, then scrolls through maintenance logs showing unexplained stability improvements in nearby ducts and vent regulators that “self-corrected” without recorded work orders. The convergence prickles at him: proof that others are independently mapping the same hidden pattern, that rumor is bleeding into reverence, and that the organism’s quiet interventions are no longer the alliance’s secret alone.
He overlays Dev’s anonymized testimonies and Savitriya’s coded notes: whispered names floating as metadata tags along the glowing strands. Prayer clusters align with subtle sensor dampening; rumor density with slight shifts in airflow routing. It is not just reacting to heat loads and pressure drops. It is watching stories, too, weighting belief as heavily as mass flow and voltage bleed.
In the Vaishnavi niche, Kavitesh settles the AR visor fully into place, feeling the familiar, fractional pressure at his temples as the world around him dims. He breathes once, deliberately, letting the lab’s status readouts and scrolling corporate slogans fade into the background. With a subvocal command, he pulls up the last overlay Dev pushed through their masked channel, the one they both pretended didn’t exist in any audit trail.
The station’s alloy ribs and labeled conduits dissolve, replaced by a ghostly vascular map that clings to the hull like a second, translucent skin. Glowing strands pulse in muted greens and blues, thick where life-support runs are robust and well-maintained, faint and intermittently stuttering where corporate neglect or colonist overuse has worn systems thin. It looks unnervingly like a living body under stress: strong arteries feeding the corporate core, hairline capillaries spidering into worker decks, places of ischemia where entire neighborhoods depend on single, overburdened lines.
He traces a filament cluster with his prosthetic’s index finger, metal tapping lightly against the transparent bulkhead. Some strands have thickened into braided ropes along Sharanam’s shadowed flank, curling protectively around the refugee ring’s thinnest plating as if bracing it from micrometeorite grit or thermal fatigue. In other places, the organism’s presence is oddly patchy: dense knots reinforcing a corridor intersection, then sudden gaps where he knows from schematics that air should flow, pumps should hum.
Out toward the Raghukul docks, the pattern becomes more asymmetrical still. Filaments lace in delicate, looping arcs around certain cargo arms and tug berths, leaving neighboring spans almost bare. The pathways Manoj once flew, those improvised “ghost lanes” along sensor-thin seams, are now lit with a subtle, repeating cadence, as if the organism has folded those experiments into its own structural memory. The spacing is not uniform, not efficient in any algorithmic sense. It looks…selective.
Kavitesh adjusts focus, calling up Dev’s anonymized incidents as faint icons along the strands: coolant anomalies, “self-correcting” vent regulators, unlogged pressure bumps smoothed out before any human hand intervened. Where laborers reported random relief from chronic leaks, the glow is richer, more braided. Where corporate metrics flagged “acceptable risk exposure” and deferred repair tickets for another quarter, he sees only thin, wavering filaments, stretched to translucency.
Somewhere between Sharanam and the docks, the organism seems to have drawn its own contour of the station. No respect for jurisdictional lines, no distinction between “core asset” and “expendable adjunct.” Its densest skeins hug not the most profitable modules, but the ones with the greatest recorded volatility: old welds, patched coolant trunks, overpopulated sleeping corridors. As if it has learned which sectors leak, which bulkheads groan at shift-change, which human clusters need quiet reinforcement more than uniform coverage.
He marks, almost absently, the sector where board minutes have been muttering about “resource optimization”. Their sterile euphemism for stripping Sharanam’s backup feeds to prop up some new corporate atrium. The overlay there looks wrong in a way that makes his throat tighten: threads that were once tentative filigree have thickened into braided bands, looping and cross‑bracing the coolant trunks like scar tissue that has decided, irrevocably, not to tear again. Stress‑heat signature, microfracture history, population density: somehow the organism has folded all of it into a decision to stay.
He dictates the official annotation in a flat, professional cadence: “Novel stabilizing biofilm envelope detected along Annex‑B coolant and hull seams. Structural modeling indicates removal may induce cascading integrity failures in adjacent trunks. Recommendation: non‑invasive observation; defer excision until comprehensive systems analysis completed.”
His prosthetic thumb, out of sight of the niche cameras, taps a different rhythm against his thigh as he composes the encrypted addendum for Dev and Savitriya. There, he names what the corporate file cannot: an emergent preference curve skewed toward overloaded, low‑status sectors. Not random colonization. Not efficiency. Something that, in any other context, he would call a bias for sheltering the fragile.
Hours earlier, in Sharanam, that bias had played out as mundane mercy drawn over years of neglect. A child, chasing a drifting toy cup between hanging saris and stacked ration crates, skidded toward a section of floor that used to sweat condensation and grow hairline frost whenever coolant cycles misaligned. Older kids called it the “ice‑bite strip”; more than one ankle had gone out there.
Now the plating felt dry and faintly warm under her bare feet. Fine capillary veins of organismal tissue, invisible from above, had spread along the seam like a hidden bandage, altering micro‑gradients just enough to stop the leak forming. An elder, watching from the shared kitchen threshold, muttered a half‑formed thanks. Partly to engineers, partly to any listening deity, and partly to the nameless “Hull Mother” whose rumored presence had become shorthand, in refugee gossip, for these small, inexplicable reprieves that arrived without authorization codes or maintenance tickets.
On the far side of the station, Manoj lines up his approach through an access corridor every pilot’s HUD flags as “noisy telemetry.” He has flown it often enough to map that noise into muscle memory: a familiar shimmer of spoofed returns that now feels like call‑and‑response, softening debris wakes and micro‑impacts the way a forest canopy breaks wind and hail. He eases the shuttle into the skew, hands light on thruster controls, letting micro‑adjustments come almost before the instruments complain, trusting that whatever curls around the hull has learned his passages and will not suddenly change its mind about human vessels skimming so close. Above his console, the tiny Hanuman charm catches a stray reflection from the aurora, the flicker of old myth brushing against new, inhuman guardianship, and he murmurs a half‑joking, half‑earnest “Jai Bajrangbali,” as if one guardian might recognize another.
He thinks of Dev hunched over stolen schematics, of Savitriya turning raw fear into language children can live inside, of Vaidisha signing reports with just enough truth to keep them all out of lockdown. Their pact feels as provisional as any ceasefire he has read about in history feeds, yet it exists, inscribed now not in statute but in shared restraint.